The ruling last month from the conservative 5th Circuit US Court of Appeals severely limits the ability of the White House, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI to communicate with social media companies about content related to Covid-19 and elections that the government views as misinformation.
“CISA used its frequent interactions with social media platforms to push them to adopt more restrictive policies on censoring election-related speech,” the three-judge panel wrote. “The platforms’ censorship decisions were made under policies that CISA has pressured them into adopting and based on CISA’s determination of the veracity of the flagged information,” they continued.