Officials of the Biden administration were prohibited from contacting social networks
A number of officials of the administration of US President Joe Biden have been banned from contacting social networks in matters of moderation of posts protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. This decision was made by US federal judge Terry A. Doughty, writes The Verge.
According to the Washington Post, it is about a lawsuit by Republican attorneys general from Louisiana and Missouri against President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.
“starting in 2017 — four years before Biden was president — officials within the government began laying the groundwork for a ‘systemic and systematic campaign’ to control speech on social media,” the plaintiffs alleged.
According to the judge in the case, the plaintiffs can prove that federal government officials are purposefully suppressing “millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.”
According to his decision, such individuals as the Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) leader Jen Easterly, and FBI Foreign Influence Task Force leader Laura Dehmlow, as well as employees of these and some other agencies, are prohibited from contacting, working with, or asking social media companies about posts protected by the First Amendment.
But this solution contains exceptions. These are posts about criminal activity or criminal conspiracy, threats to national security, threats to election security, permissible public government speech promoting public policy or views on matters of public interest, threats to public safety, efforts to detect, prevent or reduce malicious cyber activity.
The plaintiffs are also barred from working with academic groups dealing with social media, such as the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project and the Stanford Internet Observatory.