NEW ORLEANS (LifeSiteNews) — President Joe Biden’s censorship scheme with Big Tech suffered another loss when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals expanded its prior order against collusion with social media companies to include the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
The Tuesday ruling added CISA to the list of government entities that are barred from working alongside Big Tech to police online speech. The original September 8 ruling in Missouri v. Biden only applied to the White House, the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The original order is currently paused, as the Supreme Court asked both sides to submit filings on the case.
The rulings came after substantial evidence showed CISA and other government entities worked hand-in-hand with Big Tech to silence online speech that questioned the safety and effectiveness of COVID shots or raised concerns about the integrity of the 2020 election.
The agency “held regular industry meetings with the platforms concerning their moderation policies, pushing them to adopt CISA’s proposed practices for addressing ‘mis-, dis-, and mal-information,’” the ruling stated.
CISA also practiced “switchboarding” by “forwarding flagged content” sent from local election officials to Big Tech companies, the ruling stated.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey celebrated the legal victory.
“CISA, a sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security, was created to protect you from foreign attacks,” Bailey wrote on X. “The Fifth Circuit held yesterday that CISA ‘likely violated the First Amendment’ when it coerced social media companies into censoring free speech. Think about that for a second: CISA was weaponized against the very citizens it was designed to protect.”
“Missouri isn’t standing for it,” he wrote.
Harvard University medical professor and COVID contrarian Martin Kulldorff also celebrated the ruling, calling it “GREAT NEWS.”
While the censorship mostly targeted right-of-center voices, it raised alarms among civil libertarians as well.
Liberal-leaning George Washington University law Professor Jonathan Turley previously warned about the CISA program in congressional testimony. He called the program part of “an ever-expanding complex of government programs and grants directed toward the censorship or blacklisting of citizens and groups.”
“In just a matter of weeks, the size of this complex has come into greater focus and has confirmed the fears held by many of us over the use of private actors to do indirectly what the government is prohibited from doing directly,” he testified in May. “I have
called it ‘censorship by surrogate’ and CISA appears to be the latest agency to enlist private proxy actors.”
Emails proved Biden team pressured Big Tech to censor
Biden’s team regularly used social media companies as censors, according to emails released during litigation.
In one instance, a Biden staffer quickly convinced Instagram to remove an account that parodied Dr. Anthony Fauci. Plaintiffs included silenced contrarians, such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff.
One batch of emails released as part of the lawsuit found that Biden officials and Big Tech regularly met to discuss areas of censorship.
One email from a Facebook employee to two CDC staffers asked about setting up a monthly “misinfo/debunking” meeting “in addition to our weekly meetings.”