A federal judge’s decision this week to restrict the government’s communication with social media platforms could have broad side effects, according to researchers and groups that combat hate speech, online abuse and disinformation: It could further hamper efforts to curb harmful content.
Alice E. Marwick, a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was one of several disinformation experts who said on Wednesday that the ruling could impede work meant to keep false claims about vaccines and voter fraud from spreading.
The order, she said, followed other efforts, largely from Republicans, that are “part of an organized campaign pushing back on the idea of disinformation as a whole.”
Judge Terry A. Doughty granted a preliminary injunction on Tuesday, saying the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with other parts of the government, must stop corresponding with social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, who accused Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites of censoring right-leaning content, sometimes in league with the government. They and other Republicans cheered the judge’s move, in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, as a win for the First...
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