by Greg Piper
10-year agreement binds surgeon general, CDC, DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Feds agree not to stop Louisiana, Missouri and individual plaintiffs from seeking attorney's fees as "prevailing parties."
Nearly two years after the Supreme Court killed free speech, in the telling of future National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, by letting the Biden administration resume pressuring tech platforms to censor disfavored narratives on COVID-19, elections and Hunter Biden, the Trump administration has made the plaintiffs' wildest dreams come true.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, who imposed the sweeping preliminary injunction on the feds before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed it and SCOTUS lifted it for lack of legal standing, approved a consent decree Wednesday that he'll oversee for the next 10 years, constraining the current and next two administrations.
Lawyers for state plaintiffs Louisiana and Missouri and individual plaintiffs asked Doughty to approve their proposal Monday after reaching agreement with the feds. One notable coup: The plaintiffs can recover attorney's fees and the defendants "agree not to contest that Plaintiffs are prevailing parties" for the purpose of seeking attorney's fees.
The resolution came more than a year into the Trump administration's return to power, which started with President Trump's day-one executive order to "immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America," from which Doughty quotes at length in the order's introduction.
Louisiana Attorney General Ben Aguiñaga told Just the News this was the first consent decree involving First Amendment social media issues. He called it a "big freaking deal" that the federal government signed on, which required "a lot of institutional buy-in."
"Because this is new ground for everyone involved," with no "modern case law" to guide discussions on a resolution, the agreement was "the product of extensive deliberation" between and among the parties, Aguiñaga said, calling it "cutting edge."
"NCLA has been determined to secure the best agreement possible in defense of civil liberties," a spokesperson for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, representing two individuals, told Just the News in explaining the timeline.
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway's office did not answer a query.
Feds can still complain about 'wrong' posts
Doughty had approved further legal discovery in the case just days after Trump won the 2024 election, to help the states and censored doctors including Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff trace their legal injuries to federal actions by uncovering information the feds "uniquely ... control" regarding the "extent and nature" of censorship pressure.
Kulldorff and Bhattacharya, both targeted for "take down" by then-NIH Director Francis Collins for cowriting the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, are no longer plaintiffs given their roles in the Trump administration. Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, activist Jill Hines and Gateway Pundit publisher Jim Hoft are the remaining individual plaintiffs.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., perhaps the highest-profile target of federal censorship as a member of the "Disinformation Dozen" who also brought his own censorship lawsuit, in December appointed Kulldorff chief science officer in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.
The consent decree restricts the U.S. surgeon general, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has ceased nonessential operations amid the DHS shutdown.
The covered social media companies are Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn and YouTube. The restrictions apply only to the social media accounts of the individual plaintiffs and Louisiana and Missouri "government officials or agencies of these states acting solely in their official capacities."
Defendants "shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly ... to threaten Social-Media Companies with some form of punishment (i.e., an adverse legal, regulatory, or economic government sanction) unless they remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech," the order reads.
The defendants also may not "unilaterally direct or veto social media content moderation decisions of Social Media Companies," Doughty said. The order includes an exception for threats "authorized by the Constitution, statute, judicial order, or regulation."
They remain free to provide the covered social media companies "with information that the companies are free to use as they wish," the decree says. It does not "extend to statements by government officials that posts on Social Media Companies' platforms are inaccurate, wrong, or contrary to the Administration's views," absent a "threat of punishment."
The consent decree doesn't affect the non-party Federal Communications Commission, which doesn't regulate social media but whose Chair Brendan Carr has repeatedly jawboned broadcasters in the name of enforcing statutory public interest obligations on the public airwaves and stopping "news distortion."
The FCC policy on news distortion dates to the 1970s and was last updated by Democrat President Joe Biden's FCC, but seven former chairs and commissioners are petitioning the FCC to rescind it.
Carr threatened broadcasters' license renewals most recently for spreading "fake news" about the Iran war, and previously ABC's for late-night host Jimmy Kimmel's false claim that conservative activist Charlie Kirk's killer was part of the MAGA movement.
'The deep state just got checked'
The consent decree prompted cheers and told-you-sos from original and current litigants and observers including former Senate pharmaceutical corruption investigator Paul Thacker, who noted one of the government's private partners in mass-flagging of alleged misinformation, Renee DiResta, falsely claimed SCOTUS had "tossed" the case.
"Missouri struck first – and Missouri won big," Missouri GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt, who initially brought the case as AG, wrote on X. "This is the first real, operational restraint on the federal censorship machine. ... The deep state just got checked."
"George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning against tyranny," not as "a how-to guide by the federal government," Louisiana AG Liz Murrill said. "Yet our case uncovered over 20,000 pages of documents highlighting an extensive censorship campaign stemming directly from the President of the United States and his administration."
She thanked Trump and his administration for ending "one of the darkest moments in the history of the First Amendment," when "[s]hadow bans, throttling, and blocking information such as the Hunter Biden laptop were a common occurrence."
Representing Kheriaty and Hines, NCLA called the settlement "unprecedented," following legal discovery that "uncovered a vast operation emanating from the highest levels of government" directing social media to censor a wide variety of viewpoints at odds with the feds.
"People are bound to make false statements now and then when they speak their minds, a freedom the First Amendment guarantees," the civil liberties group said. "Federal officials may police the line between lawful and unlawful speech, but they have no role in deciding if speech is true or false," President Mark Chenoweth said.
NCLA emphasized it still has ongoing First Amendment lawsuits against the State Department on behalf of conservative publishers and several White House and federal officials on behalf of a censored Facebook group for vaccine-injured people.
The consent decree does a victory lap for Doughty's original reading of the case. The SCOTUS majority, "in contrast to the lower courts, did not reach the merits of the case, as it explicitly acknowledged," it says.
The justices simply found the plaintiffs hadn't shown "their harm is traceable to (caused by) the Federal Government" and never "explicitly address[ed] the question whether Plaintiffs failed to allege standing adequate to maintain the lawsuit," the decree says.
Greg Piper
Source: https://justthenews.com/nation/free-speech/big-freaking-deal-trump-axes-biden-censorship-machine-unprecedented-consent
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