| Submit your comments on this article |
| -Land of the Free |
| 'Orwellian' Biden-era censorship reined in; red states celebrate 'historic' settlement |
| 2026-03-27 |
| [FoxNews] The consent decree bars the US surgeon general, CDC and CISA from threatening or coercing social media platforms for 10 years Republican attorneys general are hailing a First Amendment victory in a censorship lawsuit against the Biden administration after two red states secured a settlement restricting federal government agencies from influencing social media companies’ moderation practices. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told Fox News Digital the settlement, a 10-year consent decree blocking several agencies from pressuring social media companies over their content, was "simply historic in nature." "Being able to set a precedent like this will help everybody in the future be able to show that this conduct is wrong," Murrill said in a phone interview. "It was Orwellian in nature from the beginning. It still is, and I'm grateful that the government is acknowledging that it shouldn't have been doing it." Missouri, Louisiana and several individual plaintiffs brought the high-profile jawboning lawsuit in 2022, alleging the Biden administration and officials in the first Trump administration inappropriately pressured social media companies to censor conservative viewpoints about COVID-19, election security and Hunter Biden's laptop. Under the settlement, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are barred for the next decade from threatening or coercing social media companies to remove or suppress protected speech. The agreement also blocks officials from giving directions on or vetoing platforms' content moderation decisions. "This is the first real, operational restraint on the federal censorship machine," said Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who brought the lawsuit when he served as his state's attorney general. "The deep state just got checked." Murrill and U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer helped with the case when they were solicitors general of Louisiana and Missouri, respectively. Murrill reflected on conversations she had at the time about "the line between coercion and government speech." "It was so clear to me that what the government was doing went way beyond appropriate boundaries in terms of deliberately throttling people's speech, taking down protected, truthful speech and forcing these corporations to bend to the White House's will," Murrill said. "That was a very scary precedent, and I think that's why this agreement is so important." The lawsuit alleged that federal government agencies and officials pressured YouTube; Twitter, now X; Facebook, now Meta; and other platforms to censor content, arguing the actions amounted to coercing the companies to remove constitutionally-protected speech. Republicans' outrage about social media censorship gained momentum in 2020 after Twitter fully restricted and Facebook suppressed the New York Post's bombshell report about the Biden family and Ukraine that was based on contents from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Discovery in the lawsuit and subsequent congressional investigations revealed that FBI officials during the first Trump administration met with social media companies and warned them just before the story was published of a possible Russian "hack and leak" operation designed to interfere with the 2020 election, which the companies later said influenced their decision to block the story. |
| Posted by:Skidmark |
| #3 |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2026-03-27 12:20 |
| #2 |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2026-03-27 07:12 |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2026-03-27 06:10 |