Free speech cuts both ways. If you’re pleased when a judge bans any and all communication among millions of citizens, you don’t actually value the first amendment, you’re just cheering a partisan victory.
You have completely miss understood the purpose of the Constitution and the 1st amendment, the Constitution is the States and the People limiting the power and role of the federal government.
The 1st amendment DOES NOT bestow or grant the US Government any freedom of speech, in fact it specifically limits the US Governments freedom / power in many ways by baring it from actions and activities that curb the speech of the people of these united states.
To proclaim this ruling is "violating the rights of the government" is a complete and utter inversion of the how the constitution works, and the direction of power.
We the people...
Now let's say you clock in to your job as Attorney General and you make it known that you think Christianity is the best and other religions are sad and misguided. Then we have a problem.
You have rights as an individual and you have official duties acting as the government but the government does not also receive your rights by proxy.
That the government was "just expressing their opinion that's totally nonbinding except of course I can exert selective regulatory scrutiny if I feel like it" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
You do have a right to share that same content on your own website and the government would have no right to make you take it down.
In no cases were people unable to express their opinions. They were unable to create posts or comments contrary to the terms of service of the site they were using to share said opinions. Much like neither of US may herein violate the terms of Hacker News.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
When a person who works for the government is acting in their official capacity, they are the government. In that case the 1st Amendment prohibits them from abridging a private citizen's freedom of speech.
When that same person is acting as a private citizen, they are protected from their speech being abridged by the government.
People at work in their government jobs, using government equipment and email addresses, with government signatures are 100% the government, not private citizens.
E.g., a regulator cannot say "if you don't burn this book, we'll tax you out of existence" while a person could say "if you don't burn this book, I'll vote to have you taxed out of existence"
Can you name a specific action that you think this injunction prohibits or potentially prohibits that you think should be allowed?
Except, that's not what's happening? The judge ordered the government not to contact a handful of companies, because it was coercing them into censoring speech it didn't like. A restraining order on a harasser is not a violation of the first amendment. This ruling is like putting a restraining order on an executive branch that was harassing companies into censoring speech.
What? You seem very misinformed. Here's the ruling:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...
HHS: 80,000
NIAID: 18,000
CDC: 11,000
Census Bureau: 5,000
FBI: 40,000 (double counted under DOJ)
DOJ: 115,000
CISA: 3000
DHS: 260,000
State Department: 14,000
Among the actions prohibited are communicating with "social media companies", defined in the injunction as including:
"Facebook/Meta, Twitter, YouTube/Google, WhatsApp, Instagram, WeChat,TikTok, Sina Weibo, QQ, Telegram, Snapchat, Kuaishou, Qzone, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, Discord, Twitch, Tumblr, Mastodon, and like companies."
That list, especially given the "like companies" part, includes easily several million people.
Also "Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or any like project or group".
What makes a group "like" those orgs?
The prohibited topics and purposes of communication are incredibly vague, basically anything contrary to "protected free speech", which has no definition in the injunction and is famously tricky to define in US law.
This amounts to a blanket ban from where I'm sitting.
If I were a low level staffer at DHS this would arguably prohibit me from expressing opinions on this matter to a friend or spouse working at a social media company, for fear of, for example, "encouraging reduction of content posted with social-media companies containing protected free speech". The fact that that example is silly is precisely my point. Injunctions must be narrowly tailored to address the specific conduct at issue. This is so broad as to make a joke of the process and in doing so harms the free speech and rule of law that are at issue in this case.
Try the Reason article posted earlier: https://reason.com/volokh/2023/07/04/july-4-injunction-bars-...
Given your example of a DHS staffer expressing opinions to a friend or family members who is employed at a social media company, there are many regulated industries like government and social media, where employees must disclose conflicts of interest. If rules reflecting this injunction were to be adopted, then disclosing relationships with social media employees would be quite reasonable. DHS staffers, who already go through extensive background checks, would not be significantly more burdened by this than any of the other disclosures that are already required.
>CISA: 3000
Glad you mentioned them, as their history of partisan censorship is well documented: https://web.archive.org/web/20230318074435/https://report.fo...
By "incredibly vague" you mean "specified with a detailed 10 point list over 1.5 pages with an additional page of specific exclusions"
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/07/04/july-4-injunction-bars-...