A federal appeals court appeared hesitant to lift a lower court ruling on Thursday limiting the Biden administration's ability to work with social media companies on content moderation, prompting one judge to make a"mob" analogy.
“I’m certainly not equating the federal government to this, but this is an analogy ... probably an inapt analogy, so, if you’ll excuse me, like if somebody is in these movies that we see with the mob or something, they don’t say and spell out things, but they have these ongoing relationships and they never actually say, ‘Go do this or else you’re going to have this consequence,’" Elrod said.
Doughty wrote that the"Orwellian" efforts by the government started in 2019 with officials asking social media companies such as Alphabet-owned YouTube, Meta's Facebook platform, and Twitter, now known as X, to minimize the spread of posts they considered to be misinformation. The appeals court on July 14 agreed to halt Doughty's injunction against the Biden administration temporarily. It blocked dozens of officials, including press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, from speaking to a host of tech firms and noted that most of the speech that had been suppressed was conservative in nature.