The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has broadened an existing injunction that bars various Federal agencies from colluding with social media to censor speech to include the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The court wrote, in part,
CISA used its frequent interactions with social-media platforms to push them to adopt more restrictive policies on censoring election-related speech. And CISA officials affirmatively told the platforms whether the content they had “switchboarded” was true or false….
Thus, when the platforms acted to censor CISA-switchboarded content, they did not do so independently. Rather, the platforms’ censorship decisions were made under policies that CISA has pressured them into adopting and based on CISA’s determination of the veracity of the flagged information. Thus, CISA likely significantly encouraged the platforms’ content-moderation decisions and thereby violated the First Amendment[.]