Settlement Stops Government From Silencing Online Speech

The government censorship machine took a huge hit Tuesday in a historic win for First Amendment rights. 

What is being billed as an “unprecedented” agreement will bar the three government agencies central to killing speech the Biden administration didn’t like from pressuring social media platforms from doing so in the future. 

“This case began with a suspicion, that blossomed into fact, that led to Congressional hearings and an Executive Order that government censorship of Americans’ social media posts should end,” said John Vecchione, Senior Litigation Counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), the nonprofit civil rights group that has battled in courts for years to bring justice to victims of government-led speech suppression. 

Also celebrating, Sen. Eric Schmitt, who, as Missouri’s attorney general, sued the Biden administration for “brazenly colluding with Big Tech to silence Missourians.” 

“This is a massive win for the First Amendment and for every American who believes in free speech,” the Missouri Republican said in a press release, adding that President Biden’s tenure in office brought “the most aggressively liberal and antiliberty excesses of government that America has ever seen.”

The Federalist and its staff were among the many victims of a concerted campaign to stifle conservative speech in particular. 

“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,” Schmitt said. 

‘From the Highest Levels of Government’

The settlement agreement and Consent Decree that ties up the remaining pieces of the landmark Missouri v. Biden lawsuit years in the making prohibits Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the U.S. Surgeon General from strong-arming social media companies into blocking or disappearing speech the agencies deem as “misinformation”, “disinformation,” or the Big Brother doozy of the Covid era, “malinformation.” And federal officials will be prohibited from interfering with social media providers’ decisions on content moderation. 

As investigations into the Twitter Files (thanks to Elon Musk’s purchase of the leftist-run platform) and several congressional hearings exposed, the social media giants at times didn’t need much arm-twisting to do the speech suppression-bidding of the Biden administration. 

The case — then known as Murthy v. Missouri — went to the U.S. Supreme Court after Biden’s Department of Justice appealed the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals’ preliminary injunction against the government. In a 2024 majority opinion written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court sided with Biden in ruling that NCLA’s clients didn’t have standing. SCOTUS kicked the case back to the district court. 

It was in the lower court that NCLA attorneys via discovery “uncovered a vast operation emanating from the highest levels of government.”

“NCLA revealed how agencies and the White House directed social media companies to censor viewpoints that conflicted with federal government messaging on topics ranging from Covid-19 to elections,” the organization’s press release states. “These egregious First Amendment violations silenced NCLA’s clients and many other Americans.”

‘Victims of This Censorship Scheme’

The New Civil Liberties Alliance’s clients included Aaron Kheriaty, a psychiatrist who opposed lockdowns and vaccine mandates as the health and media establishment worked to shame and shut down such historically-vindicated views. According to his sworn declaration, Kheriaty said that his following on Twitter — now X — was “artificially suppressed” and his posts “shadow bann[ed]”. He said that his posts didn’t show up on his followers’ feeds, and that YouTube took down a video of one of his interviews about vaccine mandates. 

Jill Hines, an activist who spearheaded “Reopen Louisiana” movement during the government-directed Covid lockdowns, told the court that her “personal Facebook account was suspended and the Facebook posts of her organization, Health Freedom Louisiana, were censored and removed for their views on vaccine and mask mandates.” 

The Federalist, which last fall won the prestigious Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism for its investigations into the Russia Collusion Hoax, was among the conservative news organizations that experienced the heavy hand of government-driven suppression. 

“My colleague [Federalist CEO] Sean Davis and I were victims of this censorship scheme, as was The Federalist. One of the censored items was a story about a TV appearance in which I said of the media, ‘They lie, they lie, they lie, and then they lie,’” Federalist Editor-in-Chef Mollie Hemingway said a year ago today in testimony before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution hearing. 

The NCLA represented The Federalist and The Daily Wire in a lawsuit against the Biden State Department, which used its Global Engagement Center “to finance the development and promotion of censorship technology and enterprises, including NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index.” The censorship technologies sought to defund and suppress conservative news, according to the ongoing lawsuit. 

Infringe No More

President Donald Trump condemned the censorship scheme through an Executive Order on the first day of his second term. The order asserts that “government 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.” That included suppressing the speech of the Democratic Party’s No. 1 enemy, Donald Trump, and his supporters. 

In the settlement, the Department of Justice agrees that the administrative state’s justifications for speech suppression, even during pandemics, don’t negate the First Amendment. 

Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana still must sign off on the agreement, and the accompanying attorneys’ fees.

“The United States government cannot abridge speech directly, nor by inducing intermediaries to do so at its bidding,” Zhonette Brown, NCLA General Counsel and Senior Litigation Counsel said in the press release. “As recognized by last year’s Executive Order, that is exactly what happened, sometimes driven by a prior administration, sometimes driven by bureaucrats, but always unlawful.”

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.