Finally, Good News: Free Speech Wins Big in Court

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Finally, Good News: Free Speech Wins Big in Court
Four years after the Twitter Files, the Missouri v. Biden case ends in a consent decree barring government from threatening protected speech - a belated but important victory
by Matt Taibbi
Mar 25, 2026

In the first week of December, 2022, a group of reporters now scattered and divided over the Iran War and other issues searched through a pile of raw correspondence at the San Francisco office of Twitter. One file we found was 67 pages of complaints about content, mostly from state officials, sent to an address marked misinformation@cissecurity. In one case, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office complained about a Fox5 Atlanta report titled, “Computer Problems Bring Down Voting Machines in Spaulding County.”

The story about technical difficulties in Spaulding County turned out to be accurate, as a “county-wide technical issue” delayed voting. Superior Court Judge Fletcher Sams ordered that ballots be kept open an extra two hours in 18 locations. In those same 67 pages we found a form letter informing the Georgia official that his complaint about the Fox story had already been forwarded to “our partners,” who included “The Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security” and “The Election Integrity Partnership” at Stanford University.

This was the first time an outsider had seen the plumbing of a wide-scale effort by federal agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to regulate mis-, dis-, and malinformation in the social media landscape.
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The Consent Decree handed down this week put into the books concepts that should provide a little comfort to those of us who fought to surface this issue. One principle agreed upon is that “modern technology does not alter the government’s obligation to abide by the strictures of the First Amendment.” It also enjoined government agencies from threatening social media companies with “some sort of punishment” if they don’t “remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social media content containing protected speech.”
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As for the 2024 election, Democrats had plenty of time to get on the right side of these issues. I know this because I privately pleaded with plenty of them behind the scenes to see how badly this was going to play in an election year. They not only refused to listen, but insisted on nominating two hardcore speech ignoramuses in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, while smearing people like Kheriaty for bringing this case.

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