A recent U.S. Federal District Judge ruling from a court in Louisiana

resulted in a preliminary injunction on several

government departments and agencies having contact with social media company higher-ups. In practice,

that means the U.S. Department of Health, Justice, Human Services, and State, alongside the Centers

for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, the FBI,

and a slew of individual government officials, are not allowed to ping social networks

about posts that violate their rules or exchange information about anything related to content

moderation.

The departments, agencies, and individuals can still contact the leadership of, for instance,

Facebook or Twitter, when they identify posts related to national security threats,

foreign interference in elections, or other sorts of criminal activity, and they can in general

ways promote, quote, government policies or views on matters of public concern,

end quote, which seems like a pretty big and vague loophole. They can also communicate about posts

that do not represent protected free speech. The core goal of this ruling seems to be to prevent

these government entities from influencing what sorts of content social networks allow to be posted and promoted and seen by users.

And that's kind of the whole ballgame here, as the ruling stems from a case brought by the Republican Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana,

accusing social platforms of basically, cowtowing to democratic lawmakers

who they believe have been putting their fingers on the scale, allegedly trying to get

social networks to block or shadow ban, algorithmically preventing the spread of content created

by conservative users. The social networks claim this is not true.

They do not do this.

And outside watchdog groups, including several that are generally aligned with conservative

...