The D.C. Circuit Court has declared that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) violated the Constitution by using keyword filters to censor comments on its social media platforms. The court’s decision stems from a dispute involving People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which argued that their comments were unfairly targeted by NIH’s filtering system on Facebook and Instagram. This case highlights ongoing tensions between government control and free speech on digital platforms.
The crux of the court’s decision hinged on three critical findings regarding the nature of the forums in question. First, the NIH’s social media accounts were determined to be limited public forums, a classification that allows for certain restrictions but not indiscriminate censorship. Second, while the NIH has the authority to curtail off-topic discussions, the court found that the agency’s keyword filters overstepped this boundary by blocking on-topic and potentially valuable contributions, particularly those from PETA on posts related to animal testing.
In delineating the scope of acceptable moderation, the court noted that NIH’s social media guidelines were intended to keep discussions relevant to the posted content. However, it criticized the agency’s keyword filters as overly broad and lacking sensitivity to the context, which, according to the court, resulted in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. Notably, NIH’s keyword list included terms directly related to animal rights activism such as “animal,” “cruel,” and even specific hashtags like “#stopanimaltesting.”
