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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.
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Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, talks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
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,” Schmitt added.
Murrill and now-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.”
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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 out the story.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill leaves the U.S. Supreme Court following oral arguments in Washington, March 18, 2024. (REUTERS/Bonnie Cash )
President Donald Trump told Fox Business in October 2020 the censorship efforts were “out of control” and intended to derail his election prospects.
“It’s like a third arm, maybe a first arm, of the DNC — Twitter, and Facebook, they’re all — like really, it’s a massive campaign contribution,” Trump said at the time.
An infamous open letter signed by 51 former top intelligence officials in the weeks before the election fueled the fire by alleging the New York Post’s story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Trump, when he took office in 2025, revoked their security clearances in an executive order and accused them of using their powerful former job titles to help discredit the story to swing the election for Joe Biden.
Judge Terry Doughty, a Louisiana-based federal judge appointed by Trump, initially issued an injunction against the Biden administration in 2023, saying evidence in the case “depicts an almost dystopian scenario” in which the federal government “seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” Biden administration officials were found, for instance, to have aggressively demanded in emails to social media companies that they remove anti-vaccine content, which they said was disinformation.
One Biden White House official told Facebook that “internally we have been considering our options on what to do about it,” while another warned Twitter to take down content “ASAP” and “immediately.”
The injunction limited the government from having certain interactions with social media companies, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit narrowed that injunction and the Supreme Court fully vacated it on appeal, finding the plaintiffs did not show they had standing. The high court punted on addressing the underlying merits of the case, leading to this week’s consent decree.
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President Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Valdosta, Georgia, on Saturday, Dec. 5, 2020. (Getty Images)
The settlement allows government officials to continue communicating with social media companies, including by flagging content or expressing disagreement, so long as the communication does not involve threats, such as implying that the companies will suffer regulatory or legal consequences.
In the settlement, the federal government did not admit any wrongdoing, and the agreement noted that the government still had authority to address criminal activity or national security threats on the platforms.
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway applauded the consent decree in a statement, saying her state “will NOT allow politicians to police speech.”
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Attorney John Vecchione of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented individuals who were named as plaintiffs in the case alongside the two states, emphasized their winding path to the consent decree.
“This case began with a suspicion, that blossomed into fact, that led to Congressional hearings and an Executive Order that government censorship of Americans’ social media posts should end,” Vecchione said. “Freedom of speech has been powerfully preserved by our clients, past and present, who initiated this suit.”
