The National Institutes of Health (NIH) violated the First Amendment rights of animal rights activists whose social media comments were deleted by the agency, a federal appeals court ruled last week.
The agency had been deleting all comments on its Facebook and Instagram pages that contained certain keywords related to criticism of the agency’s use of animal testing. Comments containing words like animal, testing, and cruel were singled out for deletion as part of a broader policy of deleting “off-topic” comments.
Activists from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sued in 2021, arguing that this practice was a clear violation of commenters’ First Amendment rights and claiming that NIH social media pages were “traditional public forums,” meaning that the NIH could not enforce any content-based restrictions on speech.
After first facing defeat at a lower court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled last Tuesday that the NIH had violated the activists’ First Amendment rights. However, the court disagreed that the NIH social media account comment sections were traditional public forums. Instead, the court agreed with NIH lawyers that the comment sections were “limited” public forums “because the government has signaled its intent to limit the discussion on those threads to specific subjects.”
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