Emergency petition filed in major Biden administration social media censorship case.

Attorneys General Oppose Biden Administration’s Motion to Stay Injunction

The attorneys general for Missouri and Louisiana have submitted a petition to oppose the Biden administration’s motion to stay an injunction against its efforts allowing it to contact social media firms about a range of online content, including its efforts to flag so-called misinformation.

Over the weekend, the two states filed (pdf) a memorandum of opposition to the administration’s motion, coming days after a federal judge partially granted an injunction that blocks various Biden administration officials and government agencies such as the Justice Department and the FBI from working with big tech firms to censor posts on social media. It came in response to a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general, who accused the White House and various federal agencies of putting pressure on social media firms to take down posts or suspend accounts.

“Evidence in this case overwhelmingly shows that the way the Government supposedly ‘prevent[s] grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes’ is to pressure and induce social-media platforms to censor disfavored viewpoints on COVID-19, elections, and other core political speech,” they argued on Sunday.

“In the end, their position is fundamentally defiant toward the Court’s judgment,” they added. “It demonstrates that the Government will continue violating First Amendment rights by censoring core political speech on social media as soon as it can get away with it. The motion to stay should be denied.”

Federal Judge Rules Against Biden Administration

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Biden administration must cease contacting social media companies about a broad range of online content, including the administration’s efforts to flag alleged misinformation. The judge said some of the administration’s past communications with social media companies violated the First Amendment, and said that during the pandemic the government “assumed a role similar to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.”

Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana wrote on July 4 that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cannot take a range of actions targeting social media posts, companies, and users of the platform.

Several officials are specifically named in the order, including Xavier Becerra, Secretary of Health and Human Services; Dr. Hugh Auchincloss, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy; White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and others.

The social media companies that were included in the lawsuit include Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp, as well as Chinese Communist Party-linked TikTok and WeChat, among other platforms. The Republican attorneys general brought their lawsuit against the administration in 2022, accusing the government of trying to censor conservative viewpoints.

The ruling marked a win for Republicans who sued the Biden administration, saying it was using the COVID-19 pandemic and the threat of alleged misinformation as an excuse to target views that went outside the mainstream narrative.

“This could be arguably one of the most important First Amendment cases in modern history,” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry told The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” in an interview after the ruling.