Federal gov't agrees not to pressure social media companies to silence dissenting voices

The federal government has agreed not to pressure or coerce social media companies to engage in censorship of disfavored opinions and reporting, bringing what one state official refers to as “one of the darkest moments in the history of the First Amendment” to an end. 

In a consent decree filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana Tuesday, the federal government agreed not to “take actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly — except as authorized by law — to threaten Social-Media Companies with some form of punishment (i.e., an adverse legal, regulatory, or economic government sanction) unless they remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”

The consent decree comes five years after three plaintiffs, along with the states of Louisiana and Missouri, filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration alleging that the federal government “unlawfully pressured, coerced, induced, and encouraged major social media platforms to censor their posts about Covid-19, the Hunter Biden laptop report, and the 2020 presidential election.” The lawsuit formerly included five plaintiffs but two of them withdrew after taking jobs in the Trump administration. 

“Plaintiffs initially filed this lawsuit based upon public statements of government officials boasting about working with social media platforms to censor disfavored speech, accompanied by open threats to punish noncompliant companies," the consent decree states.

The terms of the consent decree, which apply to the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as well as their employees and agents, are valid for 10 years. 

The government agencies named in the consent decree also cannot “unilaterally direct or veto social media content moderation decisions" of social media companies. The only social media companies subject to the consent decree are Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn and YouTube. 

The consent decree points to an executive order President Donald Trump signed upon taking office last year that claimed that the Biden 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.” 

The executive order called on the federal government to rectify its past censorship. Trump also ordered the U.S. attorney general to submit a report “with recommendations for appropriate remedial actions to be taken” based on an investigation of previous targeting of Americans’ speech in violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

In a statement reacting to the consent decree, Louisiana’s Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill recalled how “Shadow bans, throttling, and blocking information such as the [New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop article] were a common occurrence.” 

“One of the darkest moments in the history of the First Amendment is over,” she said, thanking “President Trump and his administration for defending the Constitution and ending this assault on free speech.”

“Missouri will not allow politicians to police speech,” stated Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Catherine Hanaway. “This is a huge win for Americans in securing a wall of separation between tech and state to preserve our First Amendment right to free, fair, and open debate. Our Office will continue fighting and leading the way in the fight to defend our most fundamental freedoms.”