The injunction makes an exception in the communication ban for efforts to curb illegal activity or address national security threats. Which I will begrudgingly admit, is a needed exception. But even by the White House’s statement on the motion, one can already see plainly how the government will likely use this exception to carry on doing exactly what they’ve been doing.

“This Administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections. Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present,” the statement read.

As Robby Soave pointed out at Reason, “When national intelligence officials cautioned social media companies about [the] New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, for instance, they cited the threat of foreign election interference. Efforts to purge social media of so-called Russian bots—which was, in actuality, a crackdown on legitimate speech, expressed by Americans—were conducted under the auspices of malicious activity prevention.”

[I pointed this out as well. The good news is that the exceptions in the Doughty order relate to functions specific to real law enforcement and counter-intelligence, which locks State, HHS, Census Bureau, and their subsidiary agencies out of the process. That still leaves the DoJ and FBI with the ability to perhaps work around this order, but doing so would put their personnel in real danger of prosecution if a Republican president gets elected and fresh leadership at the DoJ takes contempt orders seriously. — Ed]