Restricting the ability of the Biden administration to work with social media companies in countering online conspiracy theories is a “weaponisation of the court system” that could devastate the fight against misinformation ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a leading expert has warned.
Nina Jankowicz, a specialist in disinformation campaigns, told the Guardian that an injunction imposed by a federal judge on Tuesday against key federal agencies and officials blocking their communication with tech platforms could unleash false information in critical areas of public life. She said that election denialism and anti-vaccine propaganda could be the beneficiaries.
“This is a weaponisation of the court system. It is an intentional and purposeful move to disrupt the work that needs to be done ahead of the 2024 election, and it’s really chilling,” she said.
In Tuesday’s ruling, a federal judge from a US district in Louisiana imposed tough restrictions on federal agencies and officials liaising with social media companies over online content. The injunction, which the Biden administration appealed on Wednesday, comes amid mounting pressure from Republican leaders and rightwing groups claiming collusion between the Biden administration and social media platforms to censor conservative speech.
The judge, Terry Doughty, sided with Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri who sued the Biden administration, claiming it violated the first amendment right to free speech. He ruled that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits in showing that the government “has used its power to silence the opposition”.
He added that the Biden administration’s handling of social media content during the Covid pandemic resembled the “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’”.
If the allegations raised by the Republican officials were true, Doughty wrote, they would involve “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history”.
Jankowicz was initially named as a defendant in the Louisiana-Missouri case but was removed from the suit on grounds that she no longer has a governmental role. In April 2022, she was appointed to lead a new Department of Homeland Security unit devoted to combating online conspiracy theories and false information.
The board was shut down days later, after it came under a massive storm of rightwing criticism accusing it of censoring conservative speech. She believes that was the start of an orchestrated rightwing campaign that culminated with this week’s court order.
“They got a win in shutting us down, so why would they stop there?” she told the Guardian in an interview. “This is why the lawsuit continues – because they’ve won – and nobody knows how to deal with it.”
The disinformation expert predicted that one of the most insidious effects of the the ruling would be a rash of self-censorship on the part of civil servants. They will stop doing their jobs “because they don’t want to be on the end of a lawsuit like this”.
Jankowicz added that “nothing that the government has been doing is actually censorship. The claims that all this legal action is based upon are absolutely false. I think this is a really dark moment for the United States that such a broad injunction would be granted.”
The injunction covers several agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI, as well as named officials such as the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. They are temporarily barred from meeting with social media companies with the purpose of pressuring them to remove or delete “protected free speech”, or encouraging them in any way to do so.
In a caveat, the judge said the government could continue to inform tech companies of criminal activity, voter suppression or threats to public safety or national security.
The White House said it was evaluating its options.
Republican leaders hailed the court order as a major victory in what they portrayed as a protracted battle against leftwing censorship of their views. Eric Schmitt, the US senator from Missouri who jointly brought the lawsuit when he was attorney general of the state, said the ruling was a “huge win for the first amendment and a blow to censorship”.
In their filings, Missouri and Louisiana Republicans joined with rightwing media figures including Jim Hoft, founder of the conspiracy site Gateway Pundit, to accuse key federal agencies and officials of suppressing speech in violation of the first amendment.
They claimed “widespread collusion between government officials and social media companies” to censor content on issues such as Covid lockdowns, reporting about Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and allegations of fraud in elections.
Academic researchers have also been targeted in the Republican push. The injunction prohibits government agencies from collaborating with the Election Integrity Partnership, an alliance of researchers at Stanford University and the University of Washington who since 2020 have focused on disinformation related to federal elections.
“The fact that they would name these specific institutions is going to increase harassment towards them and stop them from doing the important work they’ve done for years to protect democracy,” Jankowicz said.
