Last week, right-wing media figures spread the debunked claim that mainstream social media companies have an anti-conservative bias after a Trump-appointed federal judge issued a preliminary injunction restricting the Biden administration “from communicating with social media companies on content moderation."

The July 4 ruling issued by U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty is part of an ongoing lawsuit by Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana alleging that “President Joe Biden’s White House, the Department of Health and Human Services and officials at other agencies committed censorship in violation of the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to remove or limit access to anti-vaccine posts and to take down the accounts of certain users.” As tech journalist Kara Swisher described, the lawsuit is part of “a right-wing effort to shut down [the] study of misinformation and the ability to point out misinformation, and they’re using one of our greatest amendments to do so." 

“This is an organized campaign,” Swisher further explained, “If you watch what they’re doing to academics, if you watch the lawsuits, they’re Republican-led — they just don’t believe in misinformation. Or they like it, I think that’s more to the point.” 

The lawsuit’s allegations echo conservatives’ tired claims that they are victims of censorship on mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and that the platforms have colluded with the Biden administration to silence them. But it’s not proof of “bias” or “censorship” for private social media companies to enforce their rules. In fact, researchers routinely find that content from conservatives often outperforms other political content, and platforms have repeatedly “bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives out of fear of reprisals.”

Doughty’s ruling nevertheless repeated right-wing media’s claims of censorship, even writing that the case depicts an “almost dystopian” scenario: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

The decision further fueled conservatives’ bogus claims of censorship, as right-wing media accused the Biden administration of conspiring with online platforms, fearmongered that the administration’s actions were “dystopian,” claimed that critics of the injunction simply hate free speech, and called for the ruling to be affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Right-wing media used the injunction to falsely accuse the Biden administration of colluding with “woke Big Tech” to silence conservatives

• Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich said “America received the greatest birthday gift it could have asked for: its free speech back.” She added that the judge “accused the Biden White House of acting as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth when they concluded and colluded with social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to censor your voice,” calling these “attacks against conservative free speech.” She then said, “This government has been a cabal, working not for you, but against you.”

• Wall Street Journal columnist and Fox contributor Jason Riley said, “If Twitter or Facebook, these other social media platforms want to say, ‘We’re private companies like Fox News. We can decide who we’ll give a platform to, who we won’t give a platform to,’ that's one thing. But, if you are then going to collude with the federal government, with federal agencies, and let them whisper in your ear and tell you ‘take down this post, take down these tweets because we think they are harmful to us politically,’ then we are talking about a whole different ball game here because that is protected speech. They can't have it both ways.”

• Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett claimed that “long ago, the Supreme Court ruled … that this kind of censorship by proxy, as it is known, violates the First Amendment. And technically, it also is a crime under the U.S. code for government officials to conspire with others to violate somebody's constitutional rights.”

• Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), who filed the lawsuit when he was previously the Missouri attorney general, celebrated the ruling on the July 5 edition of Fox News’ Hannity as a “massive win for free speech and a devastating loss for censorship.” He claimed that a “vast censorship enterprise” has been uncovered since he filed the suit, adding, “This was big government colluding and coercing Big Tech and the social media giants to censor speech,” and that “this was almost exclusively related to conservative speech.”

• The extreme anti-LGBTQ group Family Research Council tweeted a quote from Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, “The Biden admin and Big Tech: ‘It’s a relationship of both coercion and collusion with woke Big Tech social media corporations to silence Americans’ free speech in violation of the First Amendment. And lo and behold the only speech they’re silencing is conservative voices.’” 

• Rep. Ben Cline (R-VA) tweeted, “A federal judge has temporarily BLOCKED the Biden admin from colluding with Big Tech to censor content and individuals’ platforms on social media. This ruling is a good step toward further securing the free speech rights of Americans online.”

• The Media Research Center’s account Free Speech America tweeted, “Huge win for free speech as the Biden administration has been barred from colluding with Big Tech to censor and stifle content they don’t like on social media.”

Right-wing media fearmongered that the Biden administrations’ actions were “dystopian” 

• Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who joined Schmitt in filing the lawsuit, said, “Arguably this could be the most massive attack of a First Amendment right in the history of the United States,” adding, “The Biden administration believes it is the minister of truth.”

• Right-wing figure ALX tweeted, “BREAKING: A federal judge has ruled that the Biden Administration likely violated the First Amendment by censoring unfavorable views on social media, calling it ‘Orwellian’, and issued a preliminary injunction barring numerous federal officials and agencies including the DOJ and FBI from having contact with social media firms for the purpose of discouraging or removing lawfully protected speech.” 

• Fox host Will Cain celebrated the injunction as a “massive win today for free speech,” agreeing with Doughty that the Biden administration’s behavior is “Orwellian.”

After mainstream outlets including The New York Times and CNN published criticisms of Doughty’s injunction, right-wing media claimed that they hate free speech

• Cain said, “It’s understandable, meaning you don't excuse it but you can conceive why the Democrat Party, federal agencies, and permanent Washington are so antagonistic to free speech. They want no challenge to their power.” He added, “The press and Democrats who once championed themselves as protectors of free speech … liked that Republicans became the target of surveillance and censorship.”

• Rumble Exclusives content creator Glenn Greenwald tweeted, “In reporting on the ruling barring FBI and Biden officials from pressuring Big Tech to censor, the NYT says: ‘The issue of the government’s influence over social media has become increasingly partisan.’ Yep: Dems want state censorship of the internet.”

• Newsmax’s Chris Plante Show tweeted, “Fake News CNN is melting down because Biden can't work with social media companies to censor Americans! They hate free speech!”

• Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk tweeted, “Instead of simply reporting the facts that a federal judge just delivered a blockbuster injunction in Missouri v Biden blocking this administration from outsourcing its censorship regime to social media companies, The New York Times spins it as 'a ruling that could curtail efforts to fight disinformation.' Pure propaganda!”

• Citing founder Ben Shapiro, the Daily Wire claimed the ruling shows “that the Left doesn’t truly believe in freedom of speech, seeing it only as a ‘tool of power’ to enforce its dogma.”

• Right-wing pundit Jack Hunter tweeted, “A federal judge ordered the Biden administration to stop making social media companies censor their users. Good! The New York Times and establishment press think this is bad. What about stopping ‘disinformation?’ What about it? Free speech bitch. First Amendment. Look it up.” 

Right-wing media called for the case to next be brought before the U.S. Supreme Court

• OutKick founder Clay Travis claimed that “as soon as the Biden administration got into the White House, they began to bully all of the social media companies and try to keep them from allowing the marketplace of ideas, the First Amendment arguments, to exist, because they labeled it misinformation.” “I think this is a seismically important ruling, that should go all the way to the Supreme Court," he later added. “This is, I believe, hugely important, and it needs to rise all the way to the Supreme Court and become a new precedent of First Amendment law.”

• Conservative pundit and Fox contributor Tammy Bruce claimed that “clearly there is collusion, and they were using social media as proxies to control speech.” She added that if the Biden administration wins an appeal of this ruling, it would go to the Supreme Court, “which is what, certainly the left does not want … because this is the judicial system that can stop them.”

• Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger called the ruling “amazing,” adding, “I think it's inevitable the Supreme Court will take a hearing on this and may end up making a ruling about it.”

• Right-wing personality Rogan O’Handley, known online as DC Draino, tweeted, “The Biden regime will certainly appeal this nationwide injunction but the quicker they do, the sooner our 6-3 Supreme Court will likely agree with it making it the law of the land. This means if another Hunter laptop story drops, the FBI can’t coordinate w/Big Tech to censor it.”   

• Reacting to news that the Biden administration is going to appeal the ruling, Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy said, “Don't be surprised if this winds up before the U.S. Supreme Court.”