This article was originally written by Dan Hart and published in The Washington Stand.
On Independence Day, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction barring the Biden administration from directly communicating with social media platforms about “protected free speech.” Free speech advocates are seeing the ruling as a victory against the widespread censorship and deplatforming that have occurred on platforms like Twitter and Facebook in recent years.
In the ruling, Judge Terry A. Doughty wrote that it is unlawful for federal agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to contact 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.” He went on to describe how the case involves “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” that the Biden administration has “blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech,” and that the administration “almost exclusively targeted conservative speech.”
The extent to which the federal government has colluded...