Catherine L. Hanaway
Missouri Attorney General

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Catherine L. Hanaway
Missouri Attorney General

Missouri Leads In First Amendment Victory

Home 9 Press Release 9 Missouri Leads In First Amendment Victory Attorney General Catherine Hanaway Secures a Federal Consent Decree, Safeguarding American Voices from Federal Censorship for Years to Come

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo – In the fight to protect the First Amendment rights of all Americans, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway announced today that Missouri and Louisiana secured a federal consent decree with the Trump Administration to resolve Murthy v. Missouri. This agreement prohibits the federal government from using the Biden Administration’s censorship regime to force social media companies to censor the speech of the American people.

“Missouri will not allow politicians to police speech. This consent decree finally ends the biggest violation of the First Amendment in our nation’s history,” said Attorney General Hanaway. “This is a huge win for Americans in securing a wall of separation between tech and state to preserve our First Amendment right to free, fair, and open debate. Our Office will continue fighting and leading the way in the fight to defend our most fundamental freedoms.”

The new consent decree ends this litigation and gives Missouri the power to enforce the decree against the federal government.

Murthy v. Missouri was filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana on May 5, 2022. A federal court ruled in favor of Missouri, finding substantial evidence of federal censorship activities:

• “[V]irtually all of the free speech suppressed was conservative free speech.”
• At least 22 times, the White House engaged in “unrelenting pressure” against tech companies. “White House Defendants engaged in coercion to induce social-media companies to suppress free speech.” “The White House Defendants made it very clear to social-media companies what they wanted suppressed and what they wanted amplified. Faced with unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world, the social-media companies apparently complied.”
• “[T]he Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation,” and the “FBI’s failure to alert social-media companies” to this fact “is particularly troubling” after the FBI had falsely suggested to social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was fake. “After the Hunter Biden laptop story broke on October 14, 2020, [FBI agent Laura] Dehmlow refused to comment on the status of the Hunter Biden laptop in response to a direct inquiry from Facebook, although the FBI had the laptop in its possession since December 2019.”
• Facebook suppressed information at the demand of the White House, the FBI, and other federal agents, even though the information “did not violate Facebook’s policies” and thus ordinarily would not have been suppressed. “Facebook noted that in response to White House demands, it was censoring, removing, and reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines ‘that does not contain actionable misinformation.’”
• Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki issued a “threat of ‘legal consequences’” to social media companies if they do not censor misinformation more aggressively.”
• After President Biden accused social media companies of “killing people,” Facebook emailed the Surgeon General to say “it’s not great to be accused of killing people” and to say Facebook was “keen to find a way to deescalate.” Social media platforms then met with the Surgeon General. “After the meetings with social-media platforms, the platforms seemingly fell in line with the Office of Surgeon General’s and White House’s requests.”
• The “motivation” of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other defendants was specifically “a ‘take down’ of protected free speech.”
• The Department of Homeland Security “met with social-media companies to both inform and pressure them to censor content protected by the First Amendment.” It then “expanded the word ‘infrastructure’ in its terminology to include ‘cognitive’ infrastructure, so as to create authority to monitor and suppress protected free speech posted on social media.”
• DHS “Defendants believe they had a mandate to control the process of acquiring knowledge.”
• DHS helped create a pseudo-private organization “to get around unclear legal authorities, including very real First Amendment questions.”
• Federal defendants did not just censor speech directly; they also caused social media companies to change their policies. They “used meetings, emails, phone calls, follow-up meetings, and the power of the government to pressure social-media platforms to change their policies and to suppress free speech.”
• Although much of the past suppression involved COVID and elections, federal officials “have also shown a willingness to do it with regard to other issues, such as gas prices, parody speech, calling the President a liar, climate change, gender, and abortion” as well as political criticism about “the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the return of U.S. Support of Ukraine.”

The U.S. Supreme Court resolved a narrow standing question in Murthy v. Missouri and remanded for further proceedings.

This consent decree avoids the necessity of future litigation. The consent decree acknowledges that:

• The Biden Administration censored social media posts “about COVID-19, the Hunter Biden laptop report, and the 2020 Presidential election.”
• The Biden Administration “trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.”

The consent decree includes the following provisions:

• The federal government cannot pressure social media companies to remove or deplatform social media posts containing information deemed “misinformation” by the federal government.
• The federal government “cannot take actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly . . . 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 or containing protected speech.”
• The federal government cannot pressure “Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or X, LinkedIn, or YouTube” to remove or deplatform content.
• The federal government will pay attorney’s fees to the Plaintiffs.

The consent decree can be read here.