Key Points
July 26 (Reuters) - The Biden administration has asked a federal appeals court to lift an order sharply curbing government officials' communications with social media companies as a lawsuit accusing U.S. officials of seeking to censor certain views about COVID-19 and other topics online makes its way through the courts...
"The government cannot punish people for expressing different views," lawyers for U.S. President Joe Biden's administration wrote..
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in Monroe, Louisiana, said in his July 4 order that federal officials violated the right to free speech under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment when they began asking social media companies such as Meta's (META.O).
The May 2022 lawsuit alleged that U.S. government officials, under both Democratic President Joe Biden and his Republican predecessor Donald Trump, effectively coerced social media companies to censor posts over concerns they would fuel vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic or upend elections...
Doughty's order is temporarily on hold but had barred government agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, from talking to social media companies for "the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech" under the First Amendment, with narrow exceptions...
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