Yesterday, fittingly, a federal judge in Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction preventing the Department of Health and Human Services and The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Surgeon General,
the United States Census Bureau, The FBI, the The US DOJ, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Department of State, and certain specific employees of those agencies from:
"meeting with 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 speech posted on social media-platforms".
The preliminary injunction further enjoins the above agencies/people form flagging content or forwarding content to social-media companies and urging the removal/deletion/suppression of such content; encouraging/urging/etc. social-media companies to change their guidelines...
for removing protected free speech content; emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or any kind of communication with social-media companies to seek removal/suppression of free speech content; working with the Election Integrity Partnership...
the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or any similar project or group for the purpose of encouraging/inducing removal/deletion/suppression of free speech posted to social-media; threatening or pressuring social-media companies to remove/delete/suppress...
free-speech; following up with social-media companies to determine wether free speech was removed; requesting reports from social-media companies to determine whether free speech was removed/suppressed/ etc.; or notifying social-media companies to be on the lookout for...
postings containing free speech.
There are carve-outs for criminal activity, national security threads, etc. The preliminary injunction does not apply to the FDA, Treasury, US Election Assistance Commission, US Department of Commerce, and certain employees.
The injunction is supported by a 155 page opinion found here: documentcloud.org/documents/23867004-08917380420?responsive=1&title=1
This preliminary injunction will be appealed to the 5th Cir and then SCOTUS, but, in my opinion, it is well supported in law and fact, plus both of those Courts tend to limit government actions.
Ultimately, I believe this is a huge victory for free speech. With few, specific carve-outs, the government cannot limit the speech of Americans. With the advent of social media, the government found a way to limit speech without actually getting its own hands dirty...
in violation of the 1st Amendment - ask, threaten, and cajole social-media companies, the new public square - to delete and suppress posts with which it did not agree. This cannot stand and flies in the face of the intent of the 1st Amendment.
While there is much speech with which I do not agree, I do not believe that is the place of the government to limit that speech and act as the arbiter of what is true and what is not.
In 1927, SCOTUS Justice Brandeis, in his concurring opinion in Whitney v. CA, wrote: "If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
While social media enables factually incorrect, horribly offensive, and downright evil speech to spread more than it ever has, I firmly believe the solution is more speech, not to delete speech the government does not like.
Likewise, social-media companies remain free to institute and enforce their own rules about what is allowed on their platforms. They must simply be allowed to do so without the interference of the government. On the 4th of July, speech won.
The case is State of Missouri v Joseph R Biden, 3:22-CV-01213, WD of Louisiana.