Biden Administration ordered to limit social media censorship
6 Min Read
US District Judge Terry A. Doughty rules on Tuesday to limit top Biden administration officials from censorship on social media platforms.
-
Judge Terry Doughty opening remarks in Senate Committee on the Judiciary Uploaded: Nov 1, 2017. (YouTube/Screengrab)
In a dramatic development that might hamper attempts to battle misinformation about health and other concerns, a federal judge in Louisiana ordered top Biden administration officials and agencies not to contact social media platforms to block speakers and opinions they disagree with.
The decision came in a case brought by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, who alleged that the Biden administration was attempting to muzzle viewpoints and speakers who questioned its Covid policies and the legality of the 2020 election.
What was Judge Doughty's ruling?
In his ruling on Tuesday, US District Judge Terry A. Doughty of Monroe, Louisiana, stated that large swaths of the government, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, could not communicate with 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."
“The present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” Doughty wrote, adding that “in their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the federal government, and particularly the defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”
In imposing a preliminary injunction, he stated that the agencies may not meet with social media companies to discuss removing individual posts or request updates on their efforts to remove content. According to the judgment, the government can still warn platforms about posts revealing crimes, national security threats, or foreign attempts to influence elections.
Officials respond
According to a White House official, the Justice Department is evaluating the court's injunction and will weigh its options in this case. When presented with problems such as a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections, the Biden administration championed prudent policies to preserve public health, safety, and security, the official said in a statement.
The official stated that social media platforms must consider the impact their platforms have on the American people.
Meta Platforms Inc. did not respond to requests for comment. Twitter Inc. did not answer to specific questions regarding the judge's judgment, while Alphabet Inc.'s Google did not respond to a comment request.
Read next: Latest Twitter Files sequel unmasks FBI influence
US courts are increasingly being requested to serve as arbiters in disputes over social media content, which has become increasingly controversial.
Conservatives allege that the platforms limit their ideas, while Liberals argue that the platforms do not do enough to remove false, misleading, and harmful content.
Republican legislators have shifted their focus away from antitrust measures to address concerns about social media content and toward probing what they call conservative censorship.
What about the bill to censor social media posts?
One of the first legislative efforts in this direction was made earlier this year by the chairs of the Oversight and Accountability, Energy and Commerce, and Judiciary committees, who claimed that Biden administration officials and other Democrats had pressured social media platforms to remove politically inconvenient content.
The bill, which is opposed by Democrats and is unlikely to pass, would define censorship as influencing or coercing, or instructing another to influence or coerce, the removal of First Amendment-protected expression from any interactive computer service, such as social media platforms. It would also involve attempting to limit an individual's access to a platform or putting disclaimers to legally protected speech.
The debate over social media mediation is expected to reach the Supreme Court, which delayed a review of Texas and Florida statutes that would allow users to sue websites for alleged political censorship earlier this year.
Texas and Florida both approved laws in 2021 making it unlawful for computer platforms to remove or demote content that breached their terms of service.
Individual users would be able to sue firms for alleged political censorship under the regulations, which are presently barred.
Covid "fiasco"
One famous example of censoring on social media is regarding the Coronavirus pandemic, which was censored on so many social media platforms.
Earlier last month, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, Facebook was asked by the scientific "establishment" to remove several posts about Covid-19 that afterward turned out to be "debatable or true."
In a podcast discussion with the interviewer Lex Fridman that was made public on June 11, Zuckerberg admitted that the monitoring of Facebook's efforts to delete untruths is "really tricky".
"Just take some of the stuff around Covid earlier on in the pandemic," Zuckerberg explained, "Where there were real health implications but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions," adding that "Unfortunately, I think a lot of the establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts," he continued.
In an interview for CBS in August 2021, at the height of the pandemic, Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook removes anything that it deems to be "harmful" because it is against corporate policy. He added that Facebook had at the time taken down roughly 18 million postings that it had determined had spread false information about the virus.
In the summer of 2021, US President Joe Biden was one of many who criticized Facebook, saying that it served as a platform for the dissemination of "bad information" on social media, which he claimed was "killing people".
Political Censorship on Twitter
Last year in December, Former CEO and co-founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey took responsibility for the company's susceptibility to government and corporate influence.
"Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control. Only the original author may remove the content they produce. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice. The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020," he wrote in his personal blog.
Dorsey noted that he realized companies have become "far too powerful" once Twitter suspended the account of former US President Donald Trump in January 2021.
Read next: TWITTER FILES: James Woods furious on explicit Hunter post censorship
His mistake was investing in the development of tools allowing the company "to manage the public conversation," instead of "building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves," Dorsey added.
Weiss said Twitter allegedly used to have a special team instructed to "build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics."
