“Although this Preliminary Injunction involves numerous agencies, it is not as broad as it appears,” Doughty, a Trump-appointed judge, wrote in his denial of the stay. “It only prohibits something the Defendants have no legal right to do — contacting 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 posted on social-media platforms.”
Civil rights groups, academics and tech industry officials say the order — which places restrictions on more than a dozen health and law enforcement agencies and officials across the federal government — could undermine efforts to address disinformation on social media. They warn that the judge’s injunction could unravel efforts to protect U.S. elections that were developed after revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Doughty also said the Republican state attorneys general who brought the lawsuit are likely to prove that a variety of government agencies and government officials “coerced, significantly encouraged, and/or jointly participated” in suppressing social media posts that included anti-vaccination views and questioned the results of the 2020 elections.
The State Department last week canceled a meeting about 2024 election preparations with Facebook’s parent company, Meta, in the wake of Doughty’s injunction.
The ruling applies to a wide range of federal government officials, and state election officials were planning to continue their efforts to address online disinformation. Minnesota’s Democratic Secretary of State Steve Simon criticized the injunction Monday morning but said it was unlikely to affect his office’s efforts, which include communicating with social media platforms and operating a facts vs. myths website that debunks common falsehoods about voting.
“It strikes me as overly broad and intentionally counterproductive in terms of the work that all of us do to push back against disinformation,” Simon said. Still, he noted that the suit was rooted in part in an argument that the federal government’s regulatory role gave it leverage that his office doesn’t have.
“We don’t have guns and badges. There are no penalties we can impose. There is no license we can revoke or suspend,” he said. “We’re in the democracy business, not in the regulatory business.”
