(LifeSiteNews) — In what is being hailed as a “massive” win for First Amendment Rights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has issued an historic consent decree halting government-induced social media censorship as perpetrated during the Biden administration.
The unprecedented settlement “prohibits the U.S. Surgeon General, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) from pressuring social media platforms into censoring constitutionally protected speech. It also prevents federal officials from interfering with how social media companies make their content moderation decisions,” according to the office of U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) who, while serving previously as Missouri’s attorney general, brought the case against the Biden administration.
“The federal government’s social media censorship was the most massive suppression of speech in the nation’s history, it was profoundly important to resist it,” declared Philip Hamburger, founder and chief executive officer of the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which represented clients Jill Hines and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, two of several plaintiffs in the case.
The decree includes a remarkable, unequivocal statement by the federal government indicting itself, as quoted by political commentator Justin Hart:
Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.
“And then it goes further,” noted Hart, “enshrining a legal principle that should have been obvious but wasn’t treated as such”:
The Parties agree that government, politicians, media, academics, or anyone else applying labels such as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation” to speech does not render it constitutionally unprotected.
“This is a massive win for the First Amendment and for every American who believes in free speech,” said Senator Schmitt. “Under Biden, we saw the most aggressively liberal and antiliberty excesses of government that America has ever seen, and as AG I sued the Administration for brazenly colluding with Big Tech to silence Missourians.”
“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. But no longer,” said Schmitt. “This decision locks in Americans’ First Amendment rights, and guarantees that even in the digital age, the federal government cannot deplatform protected speech they simply disagree with.”
The Trump administration condemned the Biden administration’s censorship scheme in an executive order on President Trump’s first day back in office in 2025. Trump noted that the “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.”
“The United States government cannot abridge speech directly, nor by inducing intermediaries to do so at its bidding,” said Zhonette Brown, general counsel and senior litigation counsel of NCLA. “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.”
The plaintiffs in the case were the state of Missouri, three doctors who have publicly spoken out against the then-prevailing COVID-19 narrative: Renowned epidemiologists and co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff; Dr. Aaron Kheriaty; Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana Jill Hines; and Jim Hoft, owner of the news site The Gateway Pundit.
