The National Institutes of Health (NIH) violated the First Amendment rights of animal rights activists whose social media comments were deleted by the agency, a federal appeals court ruled last week.
The agency had been deleting all comments on its Facebook and Instagram pages that contained certain keywords related to criticism of the agency's use of animal testing. Comments containing words like animal, testing, and cruel were singled out for deletion as part of a broader policy of deleting "off-topic" comments.
