WASHINGTON — The State Department reached a landmark legal settlement with conservative media outlets to not “censor” their constitutionally protected speech — as was documented during the Biden administration.
A consent decree, signed off by a judge and filed Wednesday in a Texas federal court, will force the State Department to no longer throttle online engagement or seek to “fact check” American media for exercising their First Amendment rights, with exceptions for “obscenity, incitement to imminent violence or speech integral to criminal conduct.”
The decree will remain in effect until Jan. 31, 2036, and also mandate trainings for State employees and grantees to make them aware of their free speech-protection obligations.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance brought the suit in December 2023 against the Biden administration on behalf of The Daily Wire, The Federalist and other journalists who had their views suppressed on the COVID-19 pandemic, elections, voting issues, abortion, sexuality and transgenderism.
Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro, for example, had a June 2023 Facebook reel flagged, in which he mocked former President Joe Biden stumbling over his words before mistakenly spluttering: “We can only re-elect Donald Trump.”
A Federalist writer also had an article flagged for reporting on internal emails that showed then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci had privately said over-the-counter masks at drug stores aren’t “effective” in keeping COVID at bay.
An opinion piece by the conservative author Dennis Prager published by the Daily Wire that criticized the political left’s stances during the pandemic was flagged as well.
The suit alleged that, under the Biden administration, the State Department had both funded and promoted the development of technologies by private companies that were later used by social media companies or outside-of-government entities to suppress speech online.
“Today marks an important day for preserving free speech in the digital era,” said Daily Wire CEO Caleb Robinson. “The US government has acknowledged its censorship structures under the Biden administration, and will now be subject to limitations on similar behavior in the future.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche added that the “settlement is righting the historic wrong that they [the Biden administration] perpetrated against Americans, and today we say ‘never again’ will we tolerate these injustices.”
President Trump had signed an executive order in January 2025 aimed at reversing the Biden administration’s actions that “trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms.”
Lawyers in the Biden Justice Department downplayed the claims and opposed the suits in court — but that stance was reversed after Trump’s return to the White House.
Much of the content at issue had been flagged by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut down in April 2025 over censorship concerns and a move by Congress to yank its funding.
GEC had “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving,” Rubio said at the time, ripping the Biden administration for having funded its efforts.
In one instance, it gave a $100,000 grant to the London-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI) in 2021 and 2022, The Washington Examiner first reported, a media monitoring nonprofit that blacklisted at least 10 outlets with right-of-center opinion pages, including The Post, as spreaders “disinformation.”
The April 8 consent decree with the State Department was preceded by an earlier suit between the state of Missouri and the US Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA).
That also ended in a consent decree on March 25 barring the government agencies from threatening social media companies “unless they remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), who brought the case as Missouri attorney general, called it “a massive win for the First Amendment and for every American who believes in free speech.”
“From COVID to Hunter Biden’s laptop to the border, Biden officials at the highest levels of government tried to use Facebook, X, and YouTube as their speech police,” Schmitt said. “This decision locks in Americans’ First Amendment rights, and guarantees that even in the digital age, the federal government cannot deplatform protected speech they simply disagree with.”
Both decrees were agreed to by the Department of Justice and offered to pay attorneys’ fees for the plaintiffs involved. Rather than a monetary award, the State Department agreed not to use tools, technologies or fund outside-of-government entities that “intentionally suppress, censor, demonetize, or downgrade” the US media outlet’s constitutionally protected speech.
