The Biden administration on Monday appealed a judge’s decision that restricted the government’s ability to collaborate with social-media platforms to crack down on content it considers misinformation.
Filed with the Fifth U.S. District Court of Appeals, the appeal asks the court to temporarily suspend a federal judge’s July 4 order that blocked multiple executive agencies and officials from communicating with social-media companies with the objective of “encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” The request for an emergency stay was submitted after U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty denied on Monday an administration motion to block his own order.
“Although this Preliminary Injunction involves numerous agencies, it is not as broad as it appears,” Doughty wrote. “It only prohibits something the Defendants have no legal right to do — contacting social media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner, the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms.”
Doughty’s original injunction applied to agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty issued the injunction, which came after a lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, a conservative website owner, and four people who opposed the administration’s pandemic response. The plaintiffs argued that the government effectively censored free speech by using threats of regulatory action or protection while urging tech giants to scrub content that the government found objectionable.
Doughty also wrote Monday that Missouri and Louisiana were likely to succeed on the merits of their case against the Biden administration. Subsequent litigation is likely to prove, he said, that the government agencies either coerced or conspired with social-media companies to prevent the dissemination of posts with dissenting opinions on Covid vaccines and pandemic lockdowns, 2020 election-fraud complaints, and other politically charged topics.
“These items are protected free speech and were seemingly censored because of the viewpoints they expressed,” he said.
In its Thursday petition for a stay, the Biden administration’s attorneys claimed that the defendants faced serious harm because Doughty’s order would limit the federal government’s ability to coordinate “with social media companies on initiatives to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.”