“Any injunction here would prevent or limit the government’s ability to communicate with social media companies and would leave the United States vulnerable to attack. Foreign malign influence campaigns have grown in number, scope, and sophistication since 2016,” Warner wrote.

A spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, declined to comment on the record and X, formerly known as Twitter, indicated it does not answer press questions.

But Facebook’s Adversarial Threat Report from November 2023 emphasizes the importance of communication with the government and law enforcement to combat election interference — and acknowledged that the federal government has been limited in its ability to share information since July 2023.

“While we’ve continued to strengthen our internal capacity to detect and enforce against malicious activity since 2017, external insights from counterparts in government, as well as researchers and investigative journalists, can be particularly important in detecting and disrupting threat activity early in its planning taking place off-platform,” the policy says.

Many of the posts in question came at the edges of the partisan political discourse, particularly among the right wing, including posts challenging COVID-19 health measures, and the October 2020 article about Hunter Biden’s laptop. One of the plaintiffs was Jim Hoft, the owner of the St. Louis-based conservative site The Gateway Pundit. Two others were authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which questioned COVID-19 lockdown policies.

The content moderation decisions on the Hunter Biden laptop story and the Great Barrington Declaration both took place before Biden took office.

“It ought to scare the bejesus out of every American that the government would wield this much power to silence,” Schmitt said. “Because you might like, one day, somebody being censored, because it’s the thing you don’t like, but the next day, it could be your own. And I don’t want to see that.”

Republican lawmakers frequently criticize content moderation policies, claiming that the rules stifle conservative speech. Twitter, in particular, had either suspended or banned the accounts of some prominent conservatives — like former President Donald Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — before it was sold to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Still, many academics have studied the spread of false information on social media — and Special Counsel Robert Mueller found that Russia spread disinformation on social media in the hopes of influencing the 2016 presidential election.

Schmitt has said the Biden administration uses the term misinformation “as an excuse to censor” speech and has pushed back against content moderation policies. He has said if the companies limit speech, they should be subject to lawsuits like other media companies.

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