US settles social media censorship case, bars agencies from threatening penalties

By Mike Scarcella

WASHINGTON, March 24 (Reuters) – The Trump administration has agreed to a settlement that will bar three federal agencies from pressuring social media companies to remove or suppress speech, ending a high-profile lawsuit that reached the U.S. Supreme Court when Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden was president.

The settlement, filed on Tuesday in a federal court in Louisiana, resolves a lawsuit brought by Missouri, Louisiana and several individual plaintiffs who alleged that the Democratic Biden administration unlawfully coerced major social media platforms into censoring posts about topics including COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election.

Under the agreement, the Surgeon General’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are prohibited for 10 years from threatening social media companies with legal, regulatory or economic punishment to get them to take down protected speech.

The White House had no immediate comment.

John Vecchione, a lawyer for some of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement that “freedom of speech has been powerfully preserved by our clients, past and present, who initiated this suit.”

U.S. President Donald Trump, a Republican, issued an executive order in January that said the federal government under Biden “infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”

Meta’s Facebook, Google’s YouTube and X, which were not defendants in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The settlement comes nearly two years after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a lower court ruling in the case that would have imposed limits on the way the Biden administration communicated with social media platforms.

The Supreme Court voted 6-3 to reverse a lower court finding that federal officials had likely violated free speech protections.

The proposed settlement does not prevent government officials from publicly saying that social media posts are wrong or inaccurate, but only from making such statements with threats of punishment.

(Reporting by Mike Scarcella; Editing by David Bario and Cynthia Osterman)