In an exclusive interview with EWTN News, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a plaintiff in last week’s landmark settlement in the Missouri v. Biden case, described it as a hard-fought victory that sets an important legal precedent against federal government pressure on social media platforms to censor constitutionally protected speech. The settlement agreement, reached in the form of a consent decree and approved by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty on March 26, bars the U.S. surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency from threatening or directing major platforms — including Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and YouTube — to suppress constitutionally protected content.

Kheriaty, who is a Catholic bioethicist and psychiatrist and one of the named plaintiffs in the case, told EWTN News the outcome, while narrower than he hoped, still delivers a meaningful blow to what he called “the largest government-sponsored censorship effort in the digital age.”

“It would have been nice to bar all the other agencies named in the consent decree from censorship,” he said. “People should bring other lawsuits and keep fighting this machinery.”

Among others, the White House, the FBI, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were also accused of involvement in the alleged censorship efforts, but only the three named agencies are barred from censorship subject to the specific permanent injunction in last week’s decree.

The high-profile Missouri v. Biden case centered on the Biden administration’s alleged campaign to silence and suppress on social media viewpoints it opposed.

The case, originally filed in Louisiana federal court, gained national attention after it advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court under the name Murthy v. Missouri.

In June 2024, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the individual plaintiffs — who along with Kheriaty included Jill Hines, Jim Hoft, Missouri and Louisiana state accounts (as well as former co-plaintiffs Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, who later joined the Trump administration) — lacked standing to pursue the preliminary injunction. Despite that setback, the plaintiffs continued litigating in district court, leading to last week’s settlement.

The decree set what Kheriaty called an “important precedent” in a case that, with its “massive level of censorship,” is the “first of its kind during the digital age.”

The settlement agreement was negotiated on behalf of individual plaintiffs alone and does not apply to all Americans or all speech, and it does not prevent other agencies (like the FBI or State Department) from the types of actions alleged in the original lawsuit….

From EWTN News