SUMMARY
- The Department of Justice has announced the settlement of Missouri v. Biden and Children’s Health Defense v. Biden, two landmark cases that alleged the Biden administration pressured social media companies to suppress disfavored speech by American citizens
- The settlement continues the Trump administration’s efforts to unwind federal support for online censorship
- The United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana found that Biden administration officials likely had caused Americans to be deplatformed by social media companies
- Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), who at the time served as Missouri’s attorney general, sued the Biden administration for “brazenly colluding with Big Tech to silence” Americans, praised the settlements, saying it serves as the “first real, operational restraint” on federal censorship
A settlement in two landmark social media censorship cases has three important federal bodies from pressuring social media companies to take down content, setting a major legal precedent in the fight for online freedom of speech.
The settlement resolves a lawsuit brought by Missouri, Louisiana, and other individual plaintiffs who alleged that the Biden administration unlawfully coerced major social media companies into censoring posts about the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 presidential election.
Under the agreement, the Surgeon General’s Office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are barred for ten years from threatening social companies with legal, regulatory, or economic penalties to get them to take down speech protected by the First Amendment.
As the Foundation for Freedom Online’s research has revealed, CISA played a leading role in advancing political censorship online, particularly in the runup to the 2020 presidential election. The CDC and Surgeon General’s office, meanwhile, led the way on pressuring social media companies to censor speech that conflicted with official COVID-19 narratives.
The settlement falls in line with the current administration’s ongoing efforts to roll back online political censorship. President Donald Trump issued an executive order in January that said that the Biden administration “infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”
Sen. Schmitt, who led the case against the Biden administration while he served as Missouri’s attorney general, said in a written statement in March:
From COVID to Hunter Biden’s laptop to the border, Biden officials at the highest levels of government tried to use Facebook, X, and YouTube as their speech police. But no longer. This decision locks in Americans’ First Amendment rights, and guarantees that even in the digital age, the federal government cannot deplatform protected speech they simply disagree with. Missouri struck first, and we won big. For every American who is tired of being silenced by your own government—this victory is yours.
Lawsuits such as Missouri’s have had a major impact in rolling back online censorship. Dean Jackson, a major figure in the censorship industry and longtime former employee of the National Endowment for Democracy, has lamented that lawsuits such as Missouri v. Biden have hindered the work of “disinformation” researchers who push online censorship:
Many of the researchers we spoke with feared that between Musk’s release of the Twitter files hearings in the House of Representatives and ongoing court cases, that the atmosphere around their work might become unsustainably toxic, which would jeopardize their relationships between government, researchers and platforms even further. In July, these fears were made manifest by an injunction in the case of Missouri v Biden, which barred the government from interfacing with platforms or independent researchers around content moderation…Despite the injunctions reversal, many people fear that the rising political risk around this work will scare institutions like government agencies, foundations, and universities away from supporting the important work of protecting US elections from disinformation.
John Vecchione, a lawyer for some of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement that “freedom of speech has been powerfully preserved by our clients, past and present, who initiated this suit.”
