U.S. judge denies Florida's request to dismiss suit over 2021 social media law
The lengthy suit over the 2021 state law punishing social media companies for deplatforming conservatives will continue, a U.S. judge ruled on May 22, 2025. (Photo by)
A federal judge has denied Florida's motion to dismiss a lawsuit against a 2021 law punishing social media platforms for alleged censorship of conservatives.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle of the Northern District of Florida issued an order Thursday denying the state's motions to toss the suit brought by two trade associations representing social media giants and to compel those companies to turn over information about their internal policies.
The order came weeks after Hinkle held a hearing in Tallahassee in which he said he's still perplexed about what the Legislature meant to accomplish by trying to limit social media content moderation. Hinkle wrote that neither the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit nor the U.S. Supreme Court had questioned the plaintiffs' standing to sue Florida.
NetChoice and co-plaintiff Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) argue that the law violates the First Amendment and is unconstitutionally vague. The two groups represent a number of the biggest social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Apple, and Pinterest.
'Once again, a judge has confirmed the importance of the First Amendment, rejecting Florida's attempts to evade review of its unconstitutional statute,' wrote Stephanie Joyce, director of CCIA's Litigation Center, in a press release Thursday. 'This law tries to force websites to speak as the state commands, which strikes at the heart of free discourse and democracy. We now move forward with demonstrating why this law must be struck down.'
Hinkle is revisiting the case after the country's highest court punted it back to the Eleventh Circuit because the justices found that the appellate court had not conducted a proper analysis of the groups' First Amendment challenges, which in turn sent the case back to Hinkle.
The law the Legislature passed following then-former President Donald Trump's banishment from social media platforms after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol prohibits deplatforming any candidate for statewide political office. Additionally, SB 7072 granted the Florida Election Commission authority to fine platforms with gross revenues of more than $100 million or more than 100 million monthly users $250,000 per day for banning statewide candidates and $25,000 per day for candidates for other offices.
In his order Thursday, Hinkle wrote that provisions in the law, such as one banning platforms from placing candidates' posts or posts about them in a less prominent position, would give candidates a statutory right to flood users' feeds.
'The defendants have not attempted to explain what these provisions really mean or how they would be applied. Nor have the defendants offered any theory under which a state can preclude this kind of curating without violating the First Amendment,' Hinkle wrote.
Still, Hinkle, who originally issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law, leaned toward a belief that provisions of the law are unconstitutional as applied to some of the companies rather than considering the law unconstitutional on its face. He used that reasoning to deny the state's motion to force the plaintiffs to turn over more information about specific companies.
'The plaintiffs' facial challenge to SB 7072, and perhaps even to its various provisions viewed in isolation, is likely to fail — and the disputed discovery, if allowed, would almost surely make no difference,' Hinkle wrote.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNN
30 minutes ago
- CNN
What do you do when you're the lone Democrat on Trump's FCC? You go on tour
Anna Gomez, soon to be the lone Democrat on the Federal Communications Commission, has been sounding the alarm about President Donald Trump's 'weaponization' of her agency against the press. And now she's taking it on the road. Gomez has embarked on a 'First Amendment Tour' of planned speeches across multiple states, saying Trump has shown a 'pattern of censorship and control' threatening free speech rights. Under Trump-appointed Chairman Brendan Carr, the FCC has conducted what she calls 'sham investigations' against news outlets. Last week, Gomez gave a speech at California State University in Los Angeles — her first tour stop outside Washington, DC. She'll soon make appearances in Kentucky and Illinois, and the tour is expected to last through the end of the year. 'I want to speak out, make sure we get the message out about what is happening and how this is a threat to our democracy,' Gomez told CNN. The FCC's efforts to investigate news outlets — including NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS and NBC — 'is a threat to the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press,' she added, 'and I want to encourage others to join me, to speak out and to push back against this violation of the First Amendment.' Get Reliable Sources newsletter Sign up here to receive Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter in your inbox. Gomez suggested she could be fired for openly criticizing her agency. However, she said she's 'more worried about our democracy and the folks standing up to defend it.' (The FCC is an independent agency, and the president cannot fire a commissioner without just cause. If Trump removed anyone from the panel, it could trigger a legal fight.) 'I will continue to speak out, regardless of what happens, because I think it's important that we bring attention to these actions that are so contrary to our constitutional freedoms,' Gomez told CNN. After this week, Gomez, a 2023 Biden appointee, will be the only Democrat left on the five-seat commission. Her fellow Democrat, Geoffrey Starks, who was appointed by Trump and reappointed by Biden, will step down on Friday. Republican commissioner Nathan Simington, a Trump appointee, will also exit the agency at the end of this week. The departures will leave just two commissioners on the bench: Gomez and Carr, the latter of whom has openly signaled a willingness to pursue media outlets deemed unfavorable by the president. The FCC will be unable to vote on any matters until it fills a vacant seat and fulfills a required three-commissioner quorum. In the meantime, Gomez said she plans to be vocal about her chairman's actions. Since Trump returned to the White House, Carr has reopened probes into NPR and PBS over their sponsorship practices and into CBS over alleged 'news distortion.' He's reinstated complaints against ABC News for its handling of a 2024 presidential debate and opened new probes into NBCUniversal and Disney over their diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Those actions, Gomez said, have been justified by Carr using 'an undefined public interest standard,' which she translated as 'things we don't like to see.' These are 'sham investigations,' Gomez bluntly told CNN. 'They are intended to affect how these broadcasters and companies are doing their business, whether it's how they make their editorial decisions or how they change their fair hiring practices.' Gomez has also used the tour to delve into Trump's lawsuits against media companies — a tactic that has FCC connections, in the case of CBS News. The broadcaster's parent company, Paramount, is seeking the FCC's sign-off on its lucrative merger with Skydance Media. At the same time, Trump is suing CBS, accusing '60 Minutes' of deliberately mis-editing its October interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris to manipulate the election. Even though experts have deemed the lawsuit bogus, CBS is reportedly considering settling the lawsuit. Pressure to settle the case and clear the way for FCC approval has trickled down to the network. CBS News president Wendy McMahon, a '60 Minutes' ally, stepped down last month. 'It's become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward,' she wrote in her farewell memo. Weeks before that, longtime '60 Minutes' producer Bill Owens resigned because he felt he could no longer make 'independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes,' as he wrote in a memo to the show's staff. Days later, the newsmagazine's anchor Scott Pelley said that Paramount had started 'to supervise our content in new ways' amid the political pressure, and that Owens felt 'he had lost the independence that honest journalism requires.' 'That, to me, is completely against the public interest,' Gomez said of Owens and McMahon being pushed out, 'because what it says is that they are making news editorial decisions for reasons that have nothing to do with journalistic integrity, but everything to do with the corporate parent's desire to get their transaction done.' While Gomez is using her speeches to sound alarms, she said there are glimmers of hope. The audience at last week's LA show, she said, was thrilled to see press freedom groups pushing back against the administration. However, Gomez said, the overall takeaway from the LA event was just how pervasive the sense of fear for press freedom has become. 'There's a lot of fear about these actions being taken against broadcasters, in particular, and frustration,' Gomez said. 'We heard from a wide variety of people — reporters, broadcasters, professors, public media — and they all had the same message, which is that they are very nervous about the actions that this administration is taking.'
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
UC Berkeley researchers team up for first-of-its-kind lawsuit over Trump funding cuts
BERKELEY, Calif. — University of California faculty members and researchers filed suit against President Donald Trump and several federal agencies late Wednesday in what they hope will become a first-of-its-kind class action challenging the administration's sweeping cuts to research funding. The flurry of grant terminations has resulted in layoffs, the lawsuit states, and halted a variety of projects, ranging from studies on the effects of wildfire smoke to an effort to make all of Mark Twain's work available to the public. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, is the brainchild of Claudia Polsky, founding director of the environmental law clinic at the University of California, Berkeley. Though she didn't face funding cuts herself, she said she felt inspired to organize colleagues — without any institutional backing — to file a suit that could have significant implications for other academics nationwide. 'I really think the faculty are ultimately going to have to stand up for themselves,' said Polsky, who is also one of the attorneys on the case, along with UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. The University of California system is squarely in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. Apart from cutting research grants it deemed unnecessary, the administration has accused UC of failing to adequately address antisemitism on its campuses. Late last month, Leo Terrell, a senior counsel at the Justice Department who leads the federal antisemitism task force investigating the UC system, told Fox News there would be 'massive lawsuits' against the UC system and other colleges. A UC system spokesperson said it is cooperating with the administration. 'The University of California abhors antisemitism and is diligently working to address, counter and eradicate it in all its forms across the system.' The UC system, which has 10 campuses, conducts around 8% of all academic research in the country. The lawsuit was filed by five UC Berkeley staff members and one at UC San Francisco, all of whom recently lost funding, according to the suit. It accuses a host of government agencies of disregarding federal regulations and violating the researchers' free speech and due process rights by cutting funding for their studies based on questionable financial concerns or due to their subject matter and failing to follow legally required steps. Asked about suit, White House spokesman Kush Desai defended the cuts. 'Research grants are not a government entitlement that is guaranteed by the First Amendment,' he said, adding that President Trump is eager to 'restore common sense and realign government spending to match the priorities of the American people.' The litigation represents a new approach among the now vast array of lawsuits against the Trump administration, one fittingly born at UC Berkeley, known for its role in the Free Speech Movement. Faculty members there have pressed university leaders to mount a vigorous defense if and when Berkeley faces government demands like those at Columbia and Harvard before they suffered additional funding cuts. 'Individual UC Berkeley faculty have every right to pursue litigation on their own behalf,' wrote Dan Mogulof, a UC Berkeley spokesman, in an email. 'The campus administration has played no role in the initiation, development, or funding of this legal action.' A University of California spokesperson said the regents have joined two lawsuits challenging funding policy changes and dispatched administrators to Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers multiple times since March. 'These cuts threaten to stifle lifesaving biomedical research, hobble U.S. economic competitiveness and jeopardize the health of Americans who depend on cutting-edge medical science and innovation,' Stett Holbrook, a university system spokesman, said in an email. 'Appeals to grants are being handled on a case-by-case basis.' Peter Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University in Florida, sees a benefit to legal action that comes from university staff members. 'It makes a really powerful statement that the professors themselves are stakeholders and that it's just not the institutions alone,' he said. 'It's a way of saying, 'Well, if you're slow to the battlefield, we're going to get there first.'' The University of California schools are some of the largest recipients of federal research funding in academia; they took in $4 billion cumulatively last year. And they've been hit hard by the cuts. Though it's difficult to track exactly how much universities — in California or elsewhere — have lost, UC administrators have said that it's in the hundreds of millions of dollars and that it led them to impose a hiring freeze in February. The lawsuit names President Trump, the Department of Government Efficiency, and 16 federal agencies — including the National Institutes of Health; the departments of Agriculture, Education, Health and Human Services, State and Transportation; the National Science Foundation; and the Environmental Protection Agency — as defendants. The EPA, USDA, NSF, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and U.S. Department of the Interior said they do not comment on pending litigation. The other agencies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the suit. Early in his presidency, Trump signed executive orders that directed government offices to end funding for programs deemed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, along with green energy initiatives. The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency also canceled a swath of grants across many federal agencies that it considered wasteful. Government officials at multiple departments then sent notices to researchers who'd already been approved to receive grants and who were often in the middle of multiyear investigations that their funding would be cut off immediately. Some cuts were blocked by injunctions, but many still stand. Researchers can usually appeal their individual grant cancellations to the agencies, but Polsky compared such appeals to 'trying to prop individual trees back up when the entire forest is being lit on fire.' And even successful appeals may come with new conditions attached by the Trump administration. Jedda Foreman, director of the Center for Environmental Learning at the Lawrence Hall of Science, is one of the plaintiffs. Her interactive museum at UC Berkeley lost over $6 million from nine grant cancellations, according to the suit. Some funding from the NSF, for instance, supported projects intended to broaden interest in science education across different communities, she said. The NSF declined to comment on the terminations but said it canceled some awards because they were 'not in alignment with current NSF priorities.' Another lead plaintiff, history professor Christine Philliou, lost a $250,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study Greek Orthodox Christians in 19th century Turkey. It was canceled in April with no explanation other than that the agency's priorities had changed, leaving her team 'flabbergasted,' she said. The National Endowment for the Humanities didn't respond to requests for comment. 'We believed in rule of law and felt like, 'Well, we have this grant; they can't just take it last-minute,'' Philliou said. Ken Alex, director of Project Climate, UC Berkeley Law's initiative to advance solutions to global warming, is another plaintiff. He had been in the middle of a three-year study, funded by the EPA, using drones and robots to find cheaper ways to monitor methane emissions from landfills, a major contributor to climate change. But the EPA cut off Alex's funding in late April. Like many of the stop-work orders, it said only that the study no longer meets government priorities. The EPA declined to comment on funding for UC Berkeley but said it continues to invest in research 'to advance the mission of protecting human health and the environment.' The Trump administration's impact on UC Berkeley goes beyond funding cuts. In addition to a federal investigation into how the UC system addressed allegations of antisemitic incidents, the Education Department is probing UC Berkeley's finances. And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has demanded and received information from university administrators about more than 800 faculty members who signed open letters about student activism against Israel's strikes on Gaza. Several have already received calls from one or both of the agencies. The scrutiny has put professors on edge. Polsky and others organized demonstrations against the funding cuts this semester — unusual for faculty members, even at a hotbed of activism like Berkeley. The Academic Senate also passed a resolution urging the school administration to resist any intrusive government demands for reform. 'Never in the 12 years I have been at Berkeley have I seen this much faculty agreement about anything, period,' said Poulomi Saha, an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley, one of the faculty members who organized rallies. If the suit survives to be certified as a class action — a process that usually takes months — it could be opened up to any other UC faculty members or researchers whose funding has similarly been terminated since Trump returned to office. Sabeeha Merchant, a Berkeley professor of plant biology, could become one of them. Her Department of Energy grant for research developing biofuels is at risk, but a separate lawsuit has kept it in place, at least temporarily. She said she sees the UC lawsuit as sending a message to the government about the haphazard way research funding has been cut. 'You can't just snap your fingers and say, 'I don't like you and I don't like what you study; I'm going to take it away,' she said. 'I think that if we fight back and we show that our laws still work, it means something to people.' This article was originally published on
Business Wire
2 hours ago
- Business Wire
Lieff Cabraser & Farella Braun + Martel Announce That University of California Researchers Have Filed a Class Action Lawsuit Against the Trump Administration for the Illegal and Unconstitutional Termination of Critical Research Grants
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Lieff Cabraser & Farella Braun + Martel Announce that a group of six University of California faculty and other researchers have filed a class action in federal court against the Trump Administration on behalf of all UC researchers whose previously approved agency grants were terminated pursuant to Executive Orders or other directives of President Trump, as implemented through the Department of Government Efficiency ('DOGE'). University of California Researchers File Class Action Suit Against Trump Administration for Illegal & Unconstitutional Termination of Critical Research Grants Plaintiffs seek a declaration that these grant terminations violate the constitutional principle of separation of powers, the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, and the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process, as well as statutes that govern agencies' missions and grantmaking and the Administrative Procedure Act. As detailed in the Complaint, these abrupt cancellations of already awarded grants 'ignored or contradicted the purposes for which Congress created the granting agencies and appropriated funds, and dispensed with the regular procedures and due process afforded grantees under the Administrative Procedure Act, in implementing the Trump Administration's political 'cost-cutting' agenda and ideological purity campaign.' According to UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a leading constitutional law scholar and co-counsel on the case, 'President Trump and DOGE have arbitrarily cut off funding to researchers throughout the University of California system in clear violation of the Constitution and federal laws. There has not been a semblance of due process or compliance with the procedures required by federal statutes and regulations. This has caused great harm to a large number of faculty and other researchers and the UC research enterprise as a whole, with potentially grave consequences to everyone in society who benefits from the research in a myriad of disciplines." As described by Plaintiff Dr. Neeta Thakur, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at UCSF, 'The EPA has abruptly terminated a three-year grant that was supporting research on how wildfire smoke affects the lungs, heart, and brain of all Californians. My colleagues and I at UCSF and UC Berkeley have worked on this important project for two years, and its sudden end — communicated through a simple form letter — puts our progress in danger. This decision disrupts our ongoing work with community-based organizations and stops us from generating life-saving information designed to improve public health and protect the well-being of all Californians, especially those living in at-risk communities.' Plaintiff Jedda Foreman, the Director of the Center for Environmental Learning at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, explains, 'My team and I at the Lawrence Hall of Science earned NSF grants to make science education more accessible to all learners. Instilling a love of science is critical to envisioning and creating a better future for us all. In one day, we lost two projects, and nearly 75% of our funding, because of terminations by NSF. A week later, NSF terminated yet another one of our projects. These terminations haven't just affected our team, but also our longtime community partners and thousands of students across the United States.' These are just two of hundreds of examples of the damage wrought by the Trump Administration's illegal and unconstitutional terminations. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, seeks a return to the pre-Trump Administration process of orderly grantmaking that aligns with congressionally authorized purposes, and affords due process to grant-funded researchers. Plaintiffs seek, for themselves and the class of UC researchers who have suffered unlawful grant terminations, an injunction restoring their lost funding, providing them sufficient time to complete the work for which their grants were originally approved, and preventing further illegal grant terminations. Plaintiffs will be filing a motion for a temporary restraining order on June 5, 2025. The case, No. 3:25-cv-4737, is assigned to the Honorable Rita F. Lin. Background on the Lawsuit Each year, researchers in the UC system receive hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from the full spectrum of federal agencies, ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency, to the National Science Foundation, to the National Institutes of Health. These grants fund the production of new knowledge and fuel the development of discoveries that greatly benefit society at large. The grants have also been key to the innovation that has consistently earned the UC system pride of place among research institutions, including first place in the list of universities with the most utility patents. They have also made the UC Berkeley campus the number one ranked public research in institution in the world for nine of the past ten years. Before President Trump took office, federal grantmaking proceeded under the authority of Congress, which appropriated taxpayer funds for specific public purposes. For decades, agencies carried out these statutory directives and observed due process in making, renewing, and (only seldom) terminating grants. They each adhered to their own grant regulations and followed Administrative Procedure Act processes when modifying such regulations. On the rare occasions when agencies terminated grants, they did so pursuant to predictable, regularized processes and terminated grants only for reasons stated in the regulations. All of this changed abruptly on January 20, 2025 (Inauguration Day). After January 20, 2025, Defendants Donald J. Trump and DOGE, through a flurry of Executive Orders and other directives, commanded the Federal Agency Defendants to terminate scores of previously awarded research grants. As the Complaint notes, the 'abrupt, wholesale, and unilateral termination of these grants has violated the Constitution's bedrock principle of separation of powers and its guarantees of freedom of speech and due process; flouted the Impoundment Control Act limits on the Executive's ability to withhold or redirect congressionally appropriated money; ignored statutory requirements that agencies fulfill their substantive missions and fund congressionally specified activities; contravened agency-specific grant-making regulations that cannot by law be revised on an abrupt, unexplained, chaotic basis; and violated the Administrative Procedure Act through this arbitrary, capricious, and ultra vires conduct.' As further detailed in the Complaint, grounds the agencies have offered for such terminations were spurious. In some cases, agency correspondence to grantees asserted that grant termination would reduce public costs and promote government efficiency, although no evidence was provided to support this claim. In other cases, agency communications made it clear that grants were being terminated to further Defendant Trump's political objectives, which included the elimination of research on climate, environmental justice, 'gender ideology,' and 'DEI.' These grant terminations are occurring not because the grant-funded research departed from its originally approved purpose, but because that purpose now offends the political agenda and ideological requirements of the Trump Administration. In terminating these grants, the agencies have violated the Constitution, numerous federal statutes, and their own regulations. Plaintiff UC researchers have suffered concrete financial, professional, and other harms from Defendants' unilateral termination of grants for projects to which they have already dedicated time and effort; for research upon which they have staked careers and reputations; and for work with research teams through which they endeavored to train a next generation. These terminations have impaired and will impair the public-serving research mission of the UC system and the concern for public welfare that undergirds it. Named Plaintiffs and the Proposed Class will continue to suffer such harms on an ongoing basis, and will experience increasing and irreparable harm absent the court declaration and injunction they seek through this lawsuit.
