Republican Attorneys General in two states of the United States filed a lawsuit accusing Biden’s government of interfering with social media content. In response to the lawsuit, a federal judge in the United States issued an injunction prohibiting major agencies and officials of Biden’s government from meeting and communicating with social media companies on "protected speech".
The case may have a profound impact on the First Amendment, marking a key turning point in the partisan struggle over social media speech in the United States for several years, which may have a major impact on technology companies.
On July 4, local time, a federal judge in the United States banned major agencies and officials of Biden’s government from meeting and communicating with social media companies on "protected speech." This is an unconventional preliminary injunction involving an ongoing case that may have a far-reaching impact on the First Amendment.
The media is worried that this move by the judge appointed by former US President Trump may ruin years of efforts to strengthen coordination between the government and social media companies. For more than a decade, the US federal government has been trying to cooperate with social media companies to solve criminal activities, including child sexual abuse images and terrorism.
This ruling may have a major impact on technology companies, because technology companies communicate with government officials regularly, especially during emergencies such as elections and epidemics. As American courts are increasingly forced to weigh such issues, it may subvert the legal norms governing online speech for decades.
The White House retorts that social media platforms should consider the impact on the American people.
The ban was in response to lawsuits filed by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, who claimed that government officials had gone too far in encouraging social media companies to deal with posts that might cause people to hesitate to get vaccinated or subvert elections during the epidemic. Legal experts believe that these cases may eventually be submitted to the Supreme Court.
In the past five years, when the United States accused Russia of spreading false information during the 2016 election, the US federal government responded to the increasing election intervention and voter repression, and the coordination and communication between government officials and technology companies have been strengthened. During the COVID-19 epidemic, public health officials often communicated with social media companies, because false information about viruses and vaccines spread on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School, told Washington post: "The scope of the ban is extremely broad, obviously to prevent any form of contact between government actors and social media platforms."
Judge Terry A. Doughty has not yet made a final ruling on the case, but when he issued the injunction, he said that he might side with the Republican Attorney General and think that Biden’s government violated the First Amendment.
The judge’s order restricted some executive agencies in the federal government, including the Ministry of Justice, the the State Council, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and named more than a dozen officials, including Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security, and Jen Easterly, head of the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Bureau.
In addition to restricting the communication between the government and technology companies, Doughty also prohibited these institutions and officials from cooperating, coordinating and establishing partnerships with major academic groups focusing on social media, including the Election Integrity Partnership, the researchers’ alliance led by the Internet Observatory of Stanford University and the Informed Public Center of Washington University.
In the order, the judge made some exceptions to the communication between government officials and companies, including warning of national security threats, criminal activities or suppressing voters. Duke said that the exemption list highlighted the thorny issues in the case, but the order lacked clear guidance on "where is the boundary".
A White House official said that the Justice Department "is reviewing the court’s injunction and will evaluate its options in this case". The official said: "This government advocates taking responsible actions to protect public health, safety and security in the face of challenges such as deadly epidemics and foreign attacks on our elections." "Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have an important responsibility to consider the impact of their platforms on the American people, but to make independent choices about the information they provide."
Google, one of the companies named in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, declined to comment, and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.
Republican victory
The lawsuit marks a key turning point in the partisan struggle over social media speech in the United States for several years. For years, Republicans have believed that the policies of social media companies to deal with false information related to elections and public health have led to the censorship of their political views. At the same time, Democrats argue that these companies have not done enough to regulate their services to ensure that they do not undermine democracy.
What is unusual about this lawsuit is that it is not aimed at technology companies, because technology companies claim that they have the First Amendment right to determine the content displayed on the website, but at the role of the federal government in this process. This is the most successful legal effort in this regard so far.
The Republican state attorney general believes that Biden’s administration threatened to take legal action against technology companies when the comments on the platform caused controversy, which violated the First Amendment. They cited the Biden administration’s threat to take anti-monopoly actions against these companies or to revoke Section 230, which is a legal shield to protect technology giants from lawsuits. (For details, please refer to 澎湃 Technology Report "The US Supreme Court opens the trial of the fate of big technology companies: whether to cancel the 27-year Internet" umbrella "? 》）
The Trump administration has also put forward similar arguments in its struggle with social media companies. In 2020, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider the scope of Section 230. In the same week that the order was issued, Twitter put a fact check tag on Trump’s two tweets.
According to reports, this case is based on tens of thousands of communications between Biden government officials and social media companies, including emails and text messages, which mainly occurred between 2020 and 2021. The attorney general of the above-mentioned state believes that from 2017, four years before Biden became president, internal government officials began to lay the foundation for a "systematic movement" to control social media speech.
However, although Biden and dozens of officials from 11 government agencies were listed as defendants in the lawsuit, some examples cited occurred during Trump’s administration.
Since the acquisition of Twitter last year, elon musk has been echoing the views of the Republican Party, releasing internal company documents to selected journalists, implying that Twitter colluded with government officials. Although this is far from being confirmed, some documents disclosed by Musk eventually appeared in the arguments of the lawsuit.
Defendants, social media companies and experts who study false information say there is no evidence that the government systematically censors individuals in violation of the First Amendment. David Rand, an expert on misinformation at MIT, told The New York Times that his understanding is that the government has limited influence on how social media platforms handle misinformation.
Jamir Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute of Columbia University, said: "The government cannot violate the First Amendment simply by interacting with the platform on its content review and policy." "If this is what the court said, then this is a rather radical proposition that is not supported by case law."
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