GOP AGs Seek to Add Class Allegations to Social Media Censorship Suit

The Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, plus the private plaintiffs in the social media censorship lawsuit against the Biden administration, seek leave to amend their complaint to add class allegations and to certify a class, said their motion Monday (docket 3:22-cv-01213) in U.S. District Court for Western Louisiana in Monroe. The defendants oppose the motion, it said.

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty’s ruling Monday denied the plaintiffs’ claims for injunctive relief against President Joe Biden himself but permitted the rest of their social media suppression and censorship claims against the administration to move forward (see 2303200079).

The case “cries out for class-wide treatment” in light of what injunction discovery already has revealed about the “magnitude” of the administration’s “censorship activities,” said the plaintiffs’ memorandum in support of their motion. Administration officials “are unlawfully pressuring, cajoling, tricking, and threatening social-media companies into mass, viewpoint-based censorship affecting speakers and audience members across social-media platforms,” it said.

The defendants “are accomplishing their ends directly, by flagging particular content to social-media companies for censorship,” said the memorandum. They're also doing so indirectly, “by inducing social-media companies to adopt or enforce stricter policies that involve new and greater censorship,” it said.

Each time the federal government censors a speaker based on his or her right-leaning viewpoint, “it injures the rights of audience members as well as speakers,” said the memorandum. “For that reason, limiting an injunction to the speech” of the named individual plaintiffs alone “would undermine the effectiveness of relief” even for the named individual plaintiffs themselves, it said.

The individual plaintiffs “are being deprived of not only their right to speak but also their right to view constitutionally protected speech made by absentee class members,” said the memorandum. “Speakers and audience members share a common interest in this litigation,” it said. The individual plaintiffs seek to represent two classes seeking injunctive relief barring the defendants “from inducing social-media companies to censor particular contents or to adopt or enforce speech-restrictive content-moderation policies,” it said.

Expedited discovery showed the “scope and extent” of the administration’s social-media censorship activities “are far broader, and far more egregious,” than the plaintiffs “could reasonably have expected at the commencement of discovery,” said the memorandum. The censorship activities “extend across the federal government, and they affect, directly or indirectly, virtually all social-media users” in the U.S., it said. Expedited discovery “has made clear that class-wide relief is necessary and appropriate to render any preliminary injunction in this case fully effective,” it said.