I'm On the 4th of July, a federal district judge in Louisiana, Terry A. Doty issued a ruling restricting the Biden administration's ability to communicate with social media platforms.

Discussing collaboration between federal officials and the platforms to combat misinformation

about the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election, Judge Doty declared that, quote,

the United States government seems to have assumed a role similar to an

Orwellian Ministry of Truth. If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the judge claimed,

presumably with a straight face, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack

against free speech in United States history. Let's be clear, this is not a

well-crafted judicial opinion. Professor Derek Bambauer was pulling no punches when he said,

quote, the opinion is remarkable for the ratio of length to content. It's 155 pages long and there's not a single thought in it.

Writing in the New York Times,

Professor Kate Clonick observed that Judge Doty used

cherry-picked legal analysis to impose an overbroad injunction,

cabined, or maybe not, by a baffling list of exceptions.

I will add that the opinion is also riddled with factual errors.

There will be more to say about that.

The bottom line was that the Biden administration had violated the First Amendment in the judge's view

by frequently hectoring social media platforms about post-reliad line was that the Biden administration had violated the First Amendment in the judge's view

by frequently hectoring social media platforms about posts or accounts of which the government

disapproved.

But what is unclear from Judge Doty's clunky opinion, Clonick pointed out, is how to distinguish

permissible government pressure from impermissible government

coercion. On this crucial question, the judge told us nothing. The Biden administration promptly

...