A federal appeals court on Friday upheld a modified version of an injunction in the landmark Missouri v. Biden case, blocking the White House and federal agencies from pressuring social media companies to censor American citizens.
However, two major arms of the federal government, the sprawling State Department and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) were exempted from the modified injunction, which was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Mark Zuckerberg at Georgetown (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS /Getty)
In a win for opponents of online censorship, the entire FBI remains blocked from demanding censorship from social media companies under the new injunction, as is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the White House press secretary, and a host of other Biden officials who applied pressure to the tech platforms during the coronavirus pandemic.
Under the injunction, the named agencies and individuals “shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling the social-media companies’ decision-making processes.”
The prohibition will have a significant impact. As noted by the Fifth Circuit justices in their decision, the FBI’s content-flagging operations in 2020 and 2022 led to content being removed by the social media platforms 50 percent of the time. The FBI’s central role in what some are calling the “censorship-industrial complex” has been well documented by the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, as well as through investigations by the House Judiciary Committee, and disclosures from the Twitter Files.
However, the exemption of CISA from the modified injunction drew criticism from Mike Benz, a former State Department official and head of the Foundation for Freedom Online, a nonprofit that monitors online censorship.
While praising the ruling in general, Benz described the exemption of CISA as “utter insanity.”
The utter insanity of CISA being exempt from the new terms of the censorship injunction under the Missouri v. Biden ruling is fully explained in this video: https://t.co/VcuGr54fic
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) September 9, 2023
As previously reported, CISA worked closely with the infamous “Election Integrity Partnership” throughout the 2020 election, flagging posts through the EIP’s dashboard that were then funneled to social media companies for censorship.
News outlets targeted by the EIP included Breitbart News, Fox News, the New York Post, and the Epoch Times, as well as the social media accounts of prominent conservatives Charlie Kirk, Tom Fitton, Jack Posobiec, Mark Levin, James O’Keefe, and Sean Hannity, amongst others.
Despite their work with this organization, CISA executive director Brandon Wales has disputed allegations that it censors Americans.
“CISA does not and has never censored speech or facilitated censorship; any such claims are patently false,” said Wales. “In response to concerns from election officials of all parties regarding foreign influence operations and disinformation that may impact the security of election infrastructure, CISA mitigates the risk of disinformation by sharing information on election literacy and election security with the public and by amplifying the trusted voices of election officials across the nation.”
The case is Missouri v. Biden, No. 23-30445 in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.