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Appeals Court Rules White House Overstepped First Amendment on Social Media

www.nytimes.com Appeals Court Rules White House Overstepped 1st Amendment on Social Media

A Fifth Circuit panel partly upheld restrictions on the Biden administration’s communications with online platforms about their content.

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6 comments

  • The White House is a building, the trump admin did this.

    Not the current administration, nor the previous admin before before trump. Similar issues came up during the bush admin.

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    • A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that the Biden administration most likely overstepped the First Amendment by urging the major social media platforms to remove misleading or false content about the Covid-19 pandemic, partly upholding a lower court’s preliminary injunction in a victory for conservatives.

      The bot summary skipped the first and most important paragraph.

      Free Speech absolutism is fucking insane. You shouldn’t be able to have your voice amplified while saying demonstrably false statements. There’s a difference between a person being ignorant of the truth of what they’re saying, and protecting the company that chooses to ignore empirical evidence against the factuality of statements that are spreading on their platform. Why is libel/defamation only open to lawsuits if it harms someone’s ability to make a profit? Why is public safety or civil/political unrest not also a concern? Fucking capitalism.

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  • This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The ruling, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, was another twist in a First Amendment case that has challenged the government’s ability to combat false and misleading narratives about the pandemic, voting rights and other issues that spread on social media.

    The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, both Republicans, argued in a lawsuit filed last year that government agencies and officials — including some working in the administration of President Donald J. Trump — had abused their authority by coercing companies like Facebook, Twitter (now called X) and YouTube to silence critics.

    Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, noted recently that Mr. Trump’s White House had asked the company in 2019 to remove a tweet in which the model Chrissy Teigen called the president several expletives.

    Many of the cases cited in the legal challenge involved the Covid pandemic, when government officials feared that misinformation and disinformation about vaccines and other treatments hampered efforts to control the spread of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 1.1 million Americans.

    “Never in the history of this country have federal officials worked so blatantly in collusion with industry to silence the voices that question government agendas,” Mr. Kennedy, who leads the Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization, said in a statement ahead of the appellate hearing in New Orleans.

    The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, an advocacy group, argued in an amicus brief to the appellate court that the judge’s injunction was so broadly and vaguely written that it would “chill critical information sharing” among researchers, companies and government officials before the 2024 presidential election.

    The original article contains 1,087 words, the summary contains 283 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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