A federal settlement announced this week will bar three U.S. agencies from threatening social media companies with enforcement or punitive measures in order to have posts removed or suppressed, resolving a politically charged lawsuit that advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court when Joe Biden was president.
The agreement, filed Tuesday in a federal court in Louisiana, settles litigation brought by the states of Missouri and Louisiana along with several individual plaintiffs. They alleged the Biden administration had unlawfully pressured major social media platforms to censor posts on topics that included COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election.
Under the terms of the settlement, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will be prohibited for 10 years from threatening social media companies with legal, regulatory or economic punishment to induce them to remove or suppress protected speech.
The settlement does not preclude government officials from publicly stating that particular social media posts are incorrect or inaccurate. The restriction applies only to situations in which such statements are coupled with threats of punishment to compel removal.
The White House did not provide an immediate comment on the settlement.
John Vecchione, a lawyer representing some of the plaintiffs, issued a statement saying, "freedom of speech has been powerfully preserved by our clients, past and present, who initiated this suit."
The Republican president, Donald Trump, issued an executive order in January that criticized how the previous administration had interacted with online platforms, saying 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."
Major platforms including Meta's Facebook, Google's YouTube and X were not defendants in the case and did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The settlement follows a Supreme Court decision nearly two years earlier that reversed a lower court finding which would have restricted the way the Biden administration communicated with social media companies. The high court voted 6-3 to overturn the lower court ruling, concluding that federal officials had not likely violated free speech protections under that ruling.
By resolving the lawsuit through this agreement, the government has placed an explicit, time-limited limitation on three agencies' ability to couple public statements about online content with threats of legal, regulatory or economic consequences. The litigation that reached the Supreme Court and the scope of the settlement underscore continuing legal disputes over the proper boundaries of government communication with private platforms.
Context and immediate implications
The settlement clarifies that agency staff retain the right to publicly identify or criticize online content, provided those comments do not include threats of punishment intended to compel platform action. It leaves intact the ability of government officials to speak about misinformation or inaccuracies without attaching sanctions.
Because the restriction is limited to a 10-year period, the arrangement represents a time-bound change to enforcement posture rather than a permanent alteration to agency authority.