According to local media reports, Judge Terry A. Doughty took this step in response to lawsuits by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, alleging that during the COVID pandemic, tech companies were either coerced or encouraged by the White House to suppress free speech.
Following the onset of the global coronavirus pandemic in 2020, several prominent social media platforms ramped up their content moderation efforts, ostensibly to protect users from what they called "misinformation".
The content that ended up being censored included data deemed by moderators to be "false or misleading", as well as criticism of the government's anti-COVID measures such as lockdowns. The targeted content was either marked with warning labels identifying it as “false” or got yanked outright.
The lawsuits that prompted Judge Doughty to issue the injunction in question reportedly mention several prominent tech companies such as Google (the parent company of the video hosting platform YouTube), Twitter and Meta* (the parent company of the social media platform Facebook).
According to one US media outlet familiar with the text of the injunction, Doughty argued that the US government "seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’" during the pandemic, a time he described as “a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty.”
The text of the injunction also mentions that the alleged censorship in question “almost exclusively targeted conservative speech,” with Doughty stating that “viewpoint discrimination is an especially egregious form of content discrimination.”
"The government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction," he added.
*Social media company Meta is banned in Russia as an extremist organization.