This week, in a major win for First Amendment rights, the Department of Justice settled a lawsuit, Murthy v. Missouri, originally brought against the Biden administration four years ago for censoring disfavored online speech at mass scale.
Under the consent decree, the surgeon general, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency (CISA) are prohibited from taking any “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” for the next decade.
