The NIH Deleted Comments Criticizing Animal Testing. A Federal Court Says That Violates the First Amendment.
The NIH had been deleting all social media comments containing words like animal, testing, and cruel.

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."
But even if the NIH can constitutionally moderate comments based on content, the court found that the agency's restrictions on commenters' speech were unreasonably restrictive. "In the context of NIH's posts—which often feature research conducted using animal experiments or researchers who have conducted such experiments—to consider words related to animal testing categorically 'off-topic' does not" abide by common sense, wrote Judge Bradley N. Garcia for the court.
To illustrate this point, Garcia brought up the example of an Instagram post featuring a photo of the eye of a zebrafish killed in NIH research. "It is unreasonable to think that comments related to animal testing are off-topic for such a post," Garcia wrote. "Yet a comment like 'animal testing on zebrafish is cruel' would have been filtered out because 'animal,' 'testing,' and 'cruel' are all blocked by NIH's keyword filters."
Additionally, Garcia argued that the NIH's "off-topic" policy is also unreasonable because it is "inflexible and unresponsive to context," and commenters have no opportunity to challenge the removal of their comment.
"The permanent and context-insensitive nature of NIH's speech restriction reinforces its unreasonableness, especially absent record evidence that comments about animal testing materially disrupt NIH's ability to meet its objective of communicating with citizens about NIH's work," Garcia wrote. "The government should tread carefully when enforcing any speech restriction to ensure it is not viewpoint discriminatory and does not inappropriately censor criticism or exposure of governmental actions."
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
I’m a proud member of PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals.
Even feeding horse meat to unsuspecting horse lovers and burning steaks on purpose!
>>NIH had been deleting
no. NIH deleted.
Well spit in my face and call me Sally. Never in my wildest dreams would I ever suspect the NIH would censor, delete or otherwise impede the American peoples right to the 1st Amendment.
Fascists doing fascism.
Whodathunkit?
Do you know what the NIH did that was even worse?
Question the Theories of the Stolen Erections, ass promulgated by Der Dear TrumpfenFarter-Fuhrer, and Our Queen, Spermy Daniels, Who Art Glazed in Vaseline?
Testing on human subjects, again?
People keep talking about Biden v. Trump as the worst possible options and the polarized political climate. That feels wrong. Not only because Clinton v. Trump was already the worst possible and we somehow still went downhill, but if our last great hope against being human sacrifices in the labs of shadowy technocrats is the speech of low-IQ wishcasting, bleeding hearts who would, pretty openly, shove undesirable mammals in front of a bus in order to save more desirable mammals (or per the link, use children’s inability to consent to sex as a defense of animal rights), we’re fucked.
Well there was that whole episode about murdering beagles. Ted Bundy level psychopathy.
I’m going to go with ‘Everyone is assholes, including Emma.” with, despite my hatred of what was done for COVID, with the most sympathy for the NIH on this.
First, fuck you Emma. “Had been deleting all comments that contained certain keywords”? Was the NIH simply using a tool Facebook and Insta provides or were they leaning on FB and Insta to do the deleting for them? If the former, IMO, “Tough shit, PETA. Get your own FB page and link to the NIH research there.”
If the latter, who gives a shit about PETA, the NIH is leaning on social media *again* and Emma et al. have to make it about their bullshit pet cause.
Either way, unless you were deliberately trying to undermine property rights, deceive people, and have your cake and eat it too, why would you obfuscate one with the other? The animals are NIHs’, or the published researchers’ property and people screeching “Meat is murder!” at researchers or even their benefactors after the experiments have been conducted and the animals are dead actually are off-topic and aren’t performing anything resembling constructive criticism. The notion of “I can’t see how they would be off-topic.” is more disingenuous, activist bullshit.
Again, fuck you Emma, it could entirely be the case that the NIH is *illegally* leaning on Social Media… again… but you fuckers continue to diffuse and pettifog in support of your preferred activist bullshit while libertarianism was shoved in front of a bus in 2020 so, fuck your false, unicorn-fart notions of “Cat rights are human rights too.” libertarianism.
But social media is just a private company!!11!!!!