Story at-a-glance
- In May 2022, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry, along with the New Civil Liberties Alliance and a few individual plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit against Biden, arguing the White House is engaged in illegal suppression of protected speech
- Discovery documents show at least 67 federal employees across more than a dozen agencies have been engaged in illegal censorship activities
- In early July 2023, Judge Terry Doughty granted the plaintiffs’ injunction, prohibiting federal agencies and Biden administration officials from working with social media companies to limit protected speech
- September 8, 2023, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld part of the lower court’s injunction, banning the White House, surgeon general, CDC and FBI from influencing social media companies to remove “disinformation.” This is a major win, but amendments to the injunction may leave loopholes
- Most disturbingly, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is excluded from the appellate court’s injunction. CISA appears to have played a major role in the government’s censorship of Americans, so by excluding CISA, government censorship may continue via third party partners
Between the documentation obtained through a recent lawsuit against the White House and the Twitter files1 released by Elon Musk, we now know that every facet of the U.S. government, including its intelligence agencies, has been involved in illegal and unconstitutional censorship.
