A Trump-appointed judge just blocked the White House from fighting misinformation.
Conservatives have complained for years that they’ve been unfairly banned from social media platforms. Now a federal judge is banning parts of the government from communicating with social media platforms.
Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, issued a preliminary injunction on July 4 as part of a lawsuit over how much involvement the federal government can have with content on social media platforms. It forbids the Biden administration from communicating with those platforms about “protected free speech,” specifically “viewpoint discrimination,” for the purposes of trying to remove it, with the judge dramatically saying such actions may constitute “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The Biden administration will likely appeal the injunction.
It’s part of a long-running feud many Republicans have with social media platforms, which they claim disproportionately censor conservative content from what have become public town squares, albeit run by private businesses. Democrats, on the other hand, have complained that social media platforms don’t do enough to remove harmful speech and that they go out of their way to favor the right.
It also comes as social media companies have been reducing their trust and safety teams in layoffs and in the wake of Twitter’s takeover by selective free speech “absolutist” Elon Musk, who has allowed previously banned speech to proliferate on Twitter. Forbidding government agencies to even communicate with platforms about certain kinds of content removes another potential way for the platforms to mitigate harmful speech, though it also removes any potential pressure those platforms may have felt to comply with government requests. But those same companies don’t have a great track record when left to their own devices, which is part of why the government has felt the need to step in this way in the first place.
The case began when Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, along with a few private parties who feel they were unfairly banned by the platforms, sued the Biden administration last year, accusing the federal government of colluding with social media companies to censor political or politicized speech. Such allegations have been a years-long complaint from the right, but it picked up steam during the pandemic, when social media platforms became more aggressive in cracking down on health misinformation. The temporarily censored content related to a laptop that belonged to then-presidential candidate Biden’s son Hunter a few weeks before the election has also been a particular source of ire for Republicans.
