A federal Judge on Tuesday granted an injunction that bars President Joe Biden's administration agencies from contacting social media companies to request the censorship of some users, The Washington Post reported.
According to the report, the temporary injunction from Chief United States District Judge Terry A. Doughty for the Western district of Louisiana granted the injunction sought in a lawsuit by the Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, who allege the administration went too far in encouraging social media companies such as Twitter to address posts containing information it believed would increase COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy or disrupt elections.
In his ruling Tuesday, Judge Doughty said the plaintiffs "have produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content."
In the lawsuit, the attorneys general accused the Biden administration of creating a "sprawling federal 'Censorship Enterprise' " pushing the companies to remove posts that were not politically favorable to its narratives, impacting conservatives and others by suppressing their speech, calling the actions "the most egregious violations of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America."
The ruling, which is not yet permanent, still allows communications between government officials and the tech companies in cases of criminal or national security threats, the report said.
NPR reported in February that ex-Twitter executives denied the platform colluded with government agencies or the White House to suppress speech, especially regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story which the White House said was Russian disinformation.
"I believe Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016," former Twitter head of trust and safety Yoel Roth told the House Oversight Committee during a hearing at the time.
Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., however, said the company worked with government officials to shut that story down and combat posts that dissented from the administration's "approved" narratives.
"Twitter, under the leadership of our witnesses today, was a private company the federal government used to accomplish what it constitutionally cannot: limit the free exercise of speech," NPR reported Comer saying during the hearing. "Immediately following the story's publication, America witnessed a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news and the intelligence community to suppress and delegitimize the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents."