The Biden administration's censorship machine took a historic and long-overdue blow Tuesday as a landmark settlement agreement bars three federal agencies at the center of the government's social media suppression operation from ever again pressuring platforms to silence speech they disapprove of. Legal experts and First Amendment advocates are calling it an unprecedented victory — one that vindicates years of legal battles, congressional investigations, and the courageous work of journalists and citizens who refused to be silenced.
The settlement, arising from the landmark Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, prohibits the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the U.S. Surgeon General from strong-arming social media companies into blocking, removing, or suppressing content the agencies label as "misinformation," "disinformation," or the Orwellian COVID-era coinage "malinformation." Federal officials are also prohibited from interfering with social media platforms' independent content moderation decisions.
"The United States government cannot abridge speech directly, nor by inducing intermediaries to do so at its bidding," said Zhonette Brown, General Counsel and Senior Litigation Counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, the nonprofit civil rights organization that spearheaded the legal fight. "As recognized by last year's Executive Order, that is exactly what happened, sometimes driven by a prior administration, sometimes driven by bureaucrats, but always unlawful."
Years of Legal Combat
The road to Tuesday's settlement was long and hard-fought. The case began, in the words of NCLA Senior Litigation Counsel John Vecchione, "with a suspicion, that blossomed into fact, that led to Congressional hearings and an Executive Order that government censorship of Americans' social media posts should end."
The lawsuit — then known as Murthy v. Missouri after the Biden DOJ appealed an early victory — reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where in 2024 Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion ruling that NCLA's clients lacked standing, sending the case back to the district court. Far from ending the fight, the return to the lower court gave NCLA attorneys the opportunity to conduct extensive discovery — and what they found was explosive.
"NCLA revealed how agencies and the White House directed social media companies to censor viewpoints that conflicted with federal government messaging on topics ranging from Covid-19 to elections," the organization stated. "These egregious First Amendment violations silenced NCLA's clients and many other Americans."
Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO), who as Missouri's Attorney General launched the original lawsuit against the Biden administration for what he described as "brazenly colluding with Big Tech to silence Missourians," was among those celebrating the outcome.
"This is a massive win for the First Amendment and for every American who believes in free speech," Schmitt said, adding that the Biden years represented "the most aggressively liberal and anti-liberty excesses of government that America has ever seen." He specifically named the breadth of the censorship operation: "From COVID to Hunter Biden's laptop to the border, Biden officials at the highest levels of government tried to use Facebook, X, and YouTube as their speech police."
Real People, Real Harm
The settlement is not merely an abstract legal victory — it is vindication for real Americans whose lives and livelihoods were damaged by the government's censorship apparatus.
Among the NCLA's clients was Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a psychiatrist who publicly opposed lockdowns and vaccine mandates at a time when the establishment was working aggressively to shame and suppress such views. In sworn testimony, Kheriaty described how his Twitter following was "artificially suppressed," his posts shadow-banned so they would not appear in his followers' feeds, and a YouTube interview he gave about vaccine mandates removed entirely. History has vindicated his positions. The government-driven censorship machine made sure as few people as possible heard them at the time.
Jill Hines, an activist who founded the "Reopen Louisiana" movement during COVID lockdowns, told the court that her personal Facebook account was suspended and that posts from her organization, Health Freedom Louisiana, were censored and removed for expressing views on vaccine and mask mandates. She was not spreading dangerous falsehoods — she was participating in a democratic debate about public health policy. The government decided that debate was not permitted.
Conservative media organizations were also directly targeted. The Federalist — which last fall won the prestigious Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism for its investigations into the Russia collusion hoax — experienced firsthand what Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway described as the heavy hand of government-driven suppression.
"My colleague Sean Davis and I were victims of this censorship scheme, as was The Federalist," Hemingway testified before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution last year. "One of the censored items was a story about a TV appearance in which I said of the media, 'They lie, they lie, they lie, and then they lie.'"
The Machinery of Suppression
As the Twitter Files — the trove of internal communications released after Elon Musk purchased the platform — and multiple congressional hearings revealed, the social media giants frequently did not require much persuasion to carry out the Biden administration's censorship bidding. The partnership between federal agencies and Silicon Valley platforms was, at times, seamless and enthusiastic.
The NCLA also represents The Federalist and The Daily Wire in a separate ongoing lawsuit against the Biden State Department, which used its Global Engagement Center to finance the development and promotion of censorship technologies — including NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index — specifically designed to defund and suppress conservative news outlets. That case continues.
The settlement in Missouri v. Biden makes clear, in legally binding terms, that the administrative state's preferred justifications for speech suppression — including public health emergencies — do not override the First Amendment. As the DOJ agreed in the settlement, even during pandemics, the government cannot use the pretext of "misinformation" to silence its critics.
Trump Acts on Day One
President Trump moved to address the censorship regime on the very first day of his second term, signing an executive order declaring that "government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government's preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate." The order specifically acknowledged the suppression of Trump himself and his supporters as among the censorship operation's targets.
Tuesday's settlement gives that executive order permanent legal teeth, embedding the prohibition on government-directed censorship in a binding consent decree that agencies cannot simply ignore or reverse when political winds shift.
Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana must still sign off on the agreement and the accompanying attorneys' fees. But barring an unexpected development, the settlement represents a final and historic closing of one of the darkest chapters in the history of American free speech.
For every American who had a post removed, an account suppressed, a video taken down, or a career damaged because they dared to question the government's approved narrative — on COVID, on elections, on immigration, on any of the other topics the Biden administration decided were beyond debate — Tuesday's settlement is the acknowledgment they deserved and the accountability that was long overdue.
The settlement is subject to final approval by Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.
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03.25.2026