In a ruling fittingly handed down on the Fourth of July, a federal judge ordered a litany of Biden administration officials to stop encouraging social media companies to block or remove content they disliked.
Doing so, wrote District Court Judge Terry Doughty in the injunction, is a violation of the First Amendment's guarantee that speech will not be restricted by the government. Under the terms of the ruling, federal officials are banned from "meeting with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content," and "specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech."
