Judge: Biden Admin's 'Irate' Messages To Social Media Were Threats

A federal appeals court on Thursday appeared skeptical of the Biden administration's bid to reverse a court order sharply limiting its ability to ask social media companies to remove content that it considers to be misinformation.

Reuters reports Daniel Tenny, a lawyer with the Department of Justice, told a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans that U.S. officials never forced social media companies to remove posts about COVID-19, the 2020 election and other topics, as Louisiana and Missouri claimed in a lawsuit. Instead, he said, the government had informed the companies of certain posts that spread harmful misinformation.

But Circuit Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod said that "irate" messages from officials taking social media companies to task for not removing certain posts quickly enough suggested "a very close working relationship" between the government and the companies.

"It's like a supervisor complaining about a worker," she said.

Circuit Judge Don Willett said public statements by Biden officials suggesting that social media companies could face antitrust enforcement, or lose immunity from certain lawsuits under federal law, could be seen as threats.

"That's a really nice social media platform you got there - it would be a shame if something happened to it," Willett said, describing what he saw as the statements' tone.

Elrod and Willett, along with the third member of the panel, Circuit Judge Edith Brown Clement, were all appointed by Republican presidents.

Tenny countered that the social media companies mentioned in the lawsuit, including Meta Platform's Facebook, Alphabet Inc-owned YouTube and Twitter, now known as X Corp, regularly refused government requests to remove content.