• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 4, 2022

Animal rights activists are urging a federal judge to rule that the National Institutes of Health unconstitutionally blocks posts on Facebook and Instagram based on keywords associated with criticism of animal experimentation.

“This case involves a government agency’s patently unconstitutional practice of surreptitiously censoring speech it does not like -- speech that is critical of the agency -- in public forums,” the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Madeline Krasno and Ryan Hartkopf argue in papers filed Friday with U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, D.C.

The dispute dates to last September, when the activists claimed in a lawsuit that the federal agency violated the First Amendment by blocking critical posts on the National Institutes of Health's social media pages.

The advocates are seeking a declaration that the keyword blocks are unconstitutional, and a court order requiring the agencies to remove the filters.

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and others are now asking a judge to rule in their favor.

“The agency’s keyword blocking has been used to hide comments containing any of two dozen words and phrases closely associated with animal advocacy -- words like 'PETA,' 'torture,' 'hurt,' 'monkey,' and 'primate' -- and to this day still hides comments containing almost all of these words and phrases,” the activists argue in Friday's filing. (Last December, three months after the activists sued, the agency removed 'PETA' and the keywords '#stopanimaltesting,' 'stoptesting,' and '#stoptestingonanimals,'” from its blocklist, according to court documents.)

“This viewpoint- and content-based keyword blocking is unconstitutional,” the animal rights group adds.

The activists' lawyers include attorneys with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which previously sued former President Donald Trump for blocking critics on Twitter.

The National Institutes of Health argued in court papers that it “believes that off-topic and inflammatory comments undermine its goals in operating its social media pages.”

“The NIH believes that permitting any and all comments on its social media pages, regardless of content, would clutter those pages (and any live events) and ultimately dissuade interested citizens from visiting the pages and retrieving helpful public health information,” lawyers for the administration wrote in papers filed in February.

But the activists say blocking speech merely because it is “inflammatory” is a form of viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment.

They add that the agency's prohibitions on inflammatory as well as off-topic speech “are underinclusive, overinclusive, and susceptible to biased and discriminatory application.”

The filing notes that the agency allows people to make off-topic comments, as long as they are not related to animal-rights advocacy.

“The NIH does not routinely remove, much less suppress in advance, comments that violate its off-topic rule but that do not contain the blocked keywords,” the activists write.

For instance, they say, a web user was allowed to ask a question about the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine in a comment to a post about research regarding adopted children.

The government is expected to respond to the argument by May 6.