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During the COVID-19 pandemic, federal health agencies and the White House under President Joe Biden pressured social media companies to censor speech that contradicted the federal government’s narrative, but two Republican attorneys general secured a consent decree Tuesday that will prevent the government from returning to that “Orwellian” strategy.
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“It was absolutely Orwellian,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Tuesday. “The federal government is enormously powerful and they leveraged that power to threaten something that these companies hold very dear—which is their Section 230 immunity—and that threat was enough to essentially have these companies make themselves agents of the federal government.”
“Missouri will not allow politicians to police speech,” Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, also a Republican, told The Daily Signal. “The Biden censorship regime was something straight out of Orwell’s 1984. Missouri is proud to have led the most consequential fight for free speech in a generation.”
The consent decree notes that the federal government “unlawfully pressured, coerced, induced, and encouraged major social media platforms to censor their posts” about the pandemic, the reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the 2020 presidential election.
While the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from directly censoring speech, the plaintiffs accused the Biden administration of pressuring social media companies to do what the government itself could not.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 grants tech companies legal immunity for speech published on their platforms, though critics have urged reform to the policy.
“One of the most egregious acts of corruption by the Biden administration was its pressure campaign against social media companies to censor the free speech of everyday Americans,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told The Daily Signal.
“No president and no movement have experienced censorship more in recent years than President [Donald] Trump and the MAGA movement, and this administration is committed to ensuring Americans’ First Amendment rights are never impinged again.”
The Consent Decree
The consent decree, which will end the litigation from Missouri and Louisiana, binds the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency from taking any actions “to threaten social media companies with some form of punishment (i.e., an adverse legal, regulatory, or economic government sanction) unless they remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”
The decree will last for a period of 10 years, well past the next administration.
Murrill celebrated the consent decree as “historic” and “extraordinarily unusual.”
“States are frequently forced into consent decrees often by the federal government but it’s a very, very unique situation for the federal government to enter into one,” she explained.
Censorship and the Supreme Court
The attorney general noted that leaders in the Biden administration were “very deliberately chilling speech they disliked even though it was true.”
A Media Research Center report from 2020 found that many Biden voters said they would not have voted for the Democrat if they had known about the revelations from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which social media companies suppressed after the FBI suggested it had been Russian misinformation.
In 2021, a Facebook staffer told a Biden White House official that the company suppressed “often true content” because it contradicted the White House’s narrative about COVID-19 vaccines.
Louisiana and Missouri, joined by social media users whose content had been suppressed, sued in May 2022, aiming to block the censorship. On July 4, 2023, a federal district judge granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction, ordering the government to stop the censorship scheme.
The Biden administration appealed the case, however, and the Supreme Court struck down the injunction, finding that the plaintiffs lacked standing—meaning they could not prove that the government’s actions resulted in direct harms to them that the court could stop.
As the consent decree explains, however, the Supreme Court found that no plaintiff demonstrated standing for a preliminary injunction, but it did not strike the overall lawsuit.
Amid the litigation, Trump signed Executive Order 14149 on Jan. 20, 2025. The order acknowledged the Biden administration’s censorship efforts and directed agencies to identify and take actions to correct past misconduct. In light of this order, the federal agencies at issue agreed to enter into the consent decree.
Murrill acknowledged that federal entities not covered by the consent decree—notably agencies such as the FBI—arguably engaged in the suppression of free speech via social media pressure. She emphasized, however, that the consent decree sets a precedent that should help address any future attempts to silence speech.
“We’re getting a consent decree that recognizes the federal government’s obligation to abide by the First Amendment and giving us an enforceable means to ensure that they do for the next ten years,” she explained.
“We can’t undo what they did in the sense that when they throttled people’s speech and they forced their message out to the direct exclusion of contrary messaging,” Murrill noted. “That was an injury to the entire country to deprive them of true speech and true messaging and force the government’s message on them while other messaging was being blocked.”
She noted that, unlike an executive order—which a future president could strike down with the stroke of a pen—the consent decree “creates a binding agreement between the parties that can be judicially enforced.” Terminating the decree would require “a new round of litigation.”
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This article was originally published at The Daily Signal. Photo Credit: VA/Eugene Russell-Army Veteran.
