After a previous court decision failed to stop the true linchpin of government censorship, a new decision has corrected the error.

From The Federalist. In a bombshell ruling, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has shut down the “nerve center” of federal government-led speech policing, correcting a critical error in its prior jurisprudence and striking a major blow for the First Amendment and against deep-state election interference.

View Comments (4)

This content is supported by your donations.
Give today.

The court’s opinion comes in the landmark free speech case in the digital era, Missouri v. Biden. Before the litigation landed in appellate court, Louisiana District Judge Terry A. Doughty declared in a fitting Independence Day ruling that federal authorities from the Biden White House to the FBI and CDC had likely engaged in “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

They did so, Judge Doughty found, by cajoling and colluding with social media companies to silence wrong-thinking Americans on matters from election integrity to the origins of Covid. …

The district court therefore disarmed the speech police by ordering a wide-ranging preliminary injunction, prohibiting federal authorities from coercing and coordinating with platforms to suppress ever-growing categories of disfavored speech during the pendency of the case.

This incensed the feds, who proceeded to appeal the decision to the Fifth Circuit, ironically arguing that by being barred from censoring disfavored speech by social media proxy, the government itself was being censored.

The Fifth Circuit wasn’t buying that argument. It upheld the crux of the lower court’s ruling, concurring that the administrative state’s pressuring of and partnering with social media companies to squelch Americans’ speech on expressly political and subjective matters effectively rendered the platforms state actors and their “content moderation” efforts an assault on the First Amendment.

So the Fifth Circuit upheld a modified form of the injunction and imposed it on the federal authorities fingered by the plaintiffs — with one glaring omission. A Department of Homeland Security sub-agency, CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, would not be subject to the injunction. …

CISA, as the plaintiffs … had demonstrated conclusively, was the linchpin of the fed-led censorship regime. …

CISA’s Censorship Tactics

CISA has served as a censorship conductor, driving regular meetings between security agencies and social media companies aimed at encouraging the platforms to combat purported mis- and disinformation. …

CISA has served as a censorship “switchboard,” collecting purported misinformation from government and non-government actors in the form of tweets, YouTube videos, and even private Facebook messages, and relaying the flagged content to the platforms to squelch it.

Finally, CISA has served as an architect of the broader public-private censorship regime, helping originate, consult, network, and partner with often government-linked third parties to themselves serve as First Amendment-circumventing, mass-surveillance, and mass-censorship enterprises. …

In short, that social media companies flagged posts, throttled narratives, and nuked accounts en masse — specifically around elections and interfering in those elections — as the Louisiana District Court had found, was attributable to fed-led efforts coordinated and driven in large part by CISA.

So, for the appeals court not to subject CISA to its injunction was untenable. …

The plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden cried foul, petitioning the Fifth Circuit for a rehearing and a reinstatement of the injunction on CISA. Now the court has responded by fixing the latter fatal flaw.

In issuing its revised opinion, the Fifth Circuit noted that CISA had in fact likely violated the First Amendment in “coerc[ing] or significantly encourag[ing] social-media platforms to moderate content” beginning during the 2020 presidential election.

Therefore, the panel ruled that like the censorious Biden White House, CDC, and FBI, CISA too would be subject to a preliminary injunction prohibiting it from engaging in any action that would cause social media companies to suppress “protected free speech.” …

Share your prayers against censorship below.

(Excerpt from The Federalist. Photo Credit: Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash)