A federal judge on Independence Day prohibited Biden administration officials from communicating with social media platforms about “protected speech,” a ruling emerging from litigation originally filed by former Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt.
As reported by the Missouri Independent, the ruling, by Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, granted a temporary injunction barring numerous federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, from contacting 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 free speech.”
It was the most sweeping rebuke to Big Tech so far.
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The litigation was filed last year by Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry. It alleges the federal government colluded with social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to suppress the freedom of speech.
Doughty, a Trump-appointed judge, has not issued a final ruling but wrote that plaintiffs “have produced evidence of a massive effort by defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”
Schmitt, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in November, celebrated the injunction on Twitter, calling it a “big win for the First Amendment on this Independence Day,” the Independent reported.
While Missouri and Louisiana filed the case, over the last year a number of additional plaintiffs were added who have run into issues with social media companies for spreading misinformation online.
That includes Jim Hoft, founder of the Gateway Pundit, who was added to the lawsuit in August.
The Biden administration has led “the largest speech censorship operation in recent history” by working with social media companies to suppress and censor information later acknowledged as truthful,” Schmitt told the House Weaponization Committee in March.
The suit, filed in May 2022, is described by the plaintiffs as “the most important free speech lawsuit of this generation.”
The lawsuit alleges that coordination between the feds and Big Tech led to the suppression and censorship of truthful information “on a scale never before seen” using examples of the COVID lab-leak theory, information about COVID vaccinations, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and more.
Evidence shows the Biden administration has “coerced social media companies to censor disfavored speech.”
As part of the discovery process, lawyers deposed Dr. Anthony Fauci, in which they questioned him on the COVID lab-leak theory, efficacy of masks, vaccines and more.
Missouri and Louisiana had also deposed an FBI agent about the Hunter Biden laptop story, which revealed that the FBI “deliberately planted false information about ‘hack-and-leak’ operations in advance of the Hunter Biden laptop story in order to deceive social media platforms into censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
Big Tech and Big Government remain dangerously large and powerful, but Judge Doughty’s injunction offers hope that the kind of tyranny our founders rejected 247 years ago can still be combatted and, perhaps, ultimately defeated.
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Related:
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