In violation of the Constitution, the Biden administration has compelled social media companies to censor content, says a US federal court in New Orleans. Furthermore, the court ruling dictates that the US government cannot “force or encourage” future censorship.
The court now also requests an opinion from the Supreme Court.
Former Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry filed a lawsuit last year along with several individuals. They claim that the federal government collaborated with social media companies to suppress freedom of speech, thereby violating the First Amendment of the US Constitution concerning free expression.
The judgment reveals that American officials unlawfully pressured companies including Meta, Youtube, and X to censor posts they deemed contained “misinformation” related to topics such as election fraud and COVID-19. The federal court in New Orleans has ruled that the White House, FBI, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cannot “force or substantially encourage” social media platforms to remove content deemed “incorrect”, reports from outlets like Reuters indicate. This also encompasses information about COVID-19.
The Biden administration contends that they never forced but only “asked” the platforms to delete posts they believed contained “harmful information”.
It has been previously known in various contexts that the Biden administration has tried in different ways to control the information flow on social media platforms to better align with their own policies. This was documented, for example, in the so-called Twitter documents and was also formalized during a period when the Department of Homeland Security founded a board to “counteract misinformation”.
