(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) A federal judge on Tuesday ordered President Joe Biden and top-level officials in his administration to stop pressuring social media companies to censor First Amendment-protected speech.
The ruling was issued by Terry A. Doughty, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, in response to a lawsuit brought forward by Republican attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana.
Doughty ruled that the plaintiffs “produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”
In other words, the U.S. government has undertaken an effort to systematically censor Americans, the judge said.
The Biden administration’s malfeasance in this instance had to do with COVID-related social-media content, according to the judge.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,'” he said.
In his injunction, Doughty did leave room for some exceptions wherein the administration is permitted to contact social media companies.
He said they may contact each other in instances related to the security of the people or the nation, including instances of “criminal activity or criminal conspiracies,” “national security threats, extortion, or other threats,” and crimes related to domestic elections.
The Washington Post lamented the news, noting that the ruling could “undo years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies” and wrongly implying that the government will no longer be able to contact social media companies for concerns surrounding “criminal activity, including child sexual abuse images and terrorism.”
CNN panelists also decried the decision Wednesday morning.
predictable RAGE-WHINING on Missouri v Biden win for FREE SPEECH.
“we were told the President could make anyone STFU! how will we ever compete in a marketplace of ideas?!” pic.twitter.com/UfI01Uyq6F
— Brook Hines 🙈 neofeudalism noticer (@nashville_brook) July 5, 2023
Despite the whining from the establishment media, conservatives celebrated the Fourth of July victory.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, former Missouri AG who filed the lawsuit, called Doughty’s ruling a “big win for the First Amendment on this Independence Day.”
Schmitt also noted that Americans will now be able to converse freely once more, without their comments being curated by petty health officials directed by the White House.
“White House officials, CDC & others are stopped cold,” he said.
However, Schmitt added that the battle against government censorship was far from over.
“We need to continue the fight to take down the Vast Censorship Enterprise,” he said.
“Their view of ‘misinformation’ isn’t an excuse to censor,” he continued. “This is the most important free speech case in a generation.”
A White House official, who was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, told the Associated Press that the Justice Department was reviewing the injunction “and will evaluate its options in this case.”
The scope of the government’s unconstitutional collusion with Big Tech—which included instances of direct meddling in the 2020 election to actively spread disinformation and suppress damning stories related to Hunter Biden’s criminal activities—was subseqently exposed by admissions from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and in the release of the Twitter Files following billionaire Elon Musk’s purchase of the eponymous company.
Yet, despite having been caught red-handed in the effort, Democrats have brazenly continued in their efforts, with the Department of Homeland Security egregiously advancing several iterations of its controversial Disinformation Governance Board and attempting to flag the online speech of American citizens with whom it disagrees.
Facebook recently announced that it had appointed a former CIA operative to oversee its “election policies” heading into the upcoming 2024 presidential campaign season.
Headline USA’s Ken Silva and Ben Sellers, and the Associated Press, contributed to this report.
