In an exclusive interview with EWTN News, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a plaintiff in last week’s landmark settlement in the Missouri v. Biden case, described it as a hard-fought victory that sets an important legal precedent against federal government pressure on social media platforms to censor constitutionally protected speech.
The settlement agreement, reached in the form of a consent decree and approved by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty on March 26, bars the U.S. surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency from threatening or directing major platforms — including Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and YouTube — to suppress constitutionally protected content.
Kheriaty, who is a Catholic bioethicist and psychiatrist and one of the named plaintiffs in the case, told EWTN News the outcome, while narrower than he hoped, still delivers a meaningful blow to what he called “the largest government-sponsored censorship effort in the digital age.”
“It would have been nice to bar all the other agencies named in the consent decree from censorship,” he said. “People should bring other lawsuits and keep fighting this machinery.”
Among others, the White House, the FBI, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were also accused of involvement in the alleged censorship efforts, but only the three named agencies are barred from censorship subject to the specific permanent injunction in last week’s decree.
The high-profile Missouri v. Biden case centered on the Biden administration’s alleged campaign to silence and suppress on social media viewpoints it opposed.
The case, originally filed in Louisiana federal court, gained national attention after it advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court under the name Murthy v. Missouri.
In June 2024, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the individual plaintiffs — who along with Kheriaty included Jill Hines, Jim Hoft, Missouri and Louisiana state accounts (as well as former co-plaintiffs Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, who later joined the Trump administration) — lacked standing to pursue the preliminary injunction. Despite that setback, the plaintiffs continued litigating in district court, leading to last week’s settlement.
‘An important precedent’
The decree set what Kheriaty called an “important precedent” in a case that, with its “massive level of censorship,” is the “first of its kind during the digital age.”
The settlement agreement was negotiated on behalf of individual plaintiffs alone and does not apply to all Americans or all speech, and it does not prevent other agencies (like the FBI or State Department) from the types of actions alleged in the original lawsuit.
“Unfortunately, we had to negotiate the settlement agreement so that it only applies to us, the plaintiffs, not to everyone in the country,” Kheriaty said. “So what about everyone else? Are we the only citizens whose free speech is protected?”
Not exactly, he said. “While the settlement is limited to the plaintiffs, it functions like a court ruling, which means it’s now a precedent in federal court, which is the main thing we wanted.”
“There were no precedents before this. Having a legal precedent isn’t trivial,” he said.
The consent decree explicitly recognizes that simply labeling speech as “misinformation” or “disinformation” does not strip it of constitutional protection.
Kheriaty said it was important to win the case in court, as well as in the court of public opinion. “The main thing our case accomplished was to help the public learn what the Biden administration was doing,” he said. “There were 20,000 pages of discovery. Our case and the Twitter files put this on the map for the American people,” he said. “Elon Musk got involved. Americans learned of the public-private partnerships, nonprofits, and universities involved in the government’s censorship.”
“It even became an issue in the presidential election,” he said, citing Vice President JD Vance’s response during the vice presidential debate, where Vance said the censorship engaged in by the Biden administration was a “threat to democracy” on “an industrial scale.”
Kheriaty also lauded President Donald Trump’s executive order stating that the Biden administration had “infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”
Kheriaty said discovery from the Missouri v. Biden case led to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a letter to Jim Jordan and in an appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, to admit “to what we were alleging in our case,” Kheriaty said. “Zuckerberg said censorship was happening at Facebook because the government pressured them. He apologized, said it was a mistake.”
“That’s a big deal.”
‘Plenty of evidence’ to show censorship
Kheriaty’s successful suit against the federal government stemmed from the censorship of his social media posts regarding an earlier lawsuit he filed against his employer, which gained national attention in 2021. In the suit, he publicly opposed the COVID-19 vaccine mandate at the university, challenging it on the constitutional grounds of equal protection and due process.
He argued at that time that his prior infection with COVID-19 (contracted in July 2020) provided robust natural immunity, making the vaccine requirement unnecessary and discriminatory for him and others in similar situations.
The university, where he directed the Medical Ethics Program and chaired the hospital ethics committee, first placed him on investigatory leave, then unpaid suspension, “and then eventually fired me,” he said.
“I didn’t really have a Plan B if I got fired,” Kheriaty said. “It was a wild ride.”
“God took care of us,” he continued. “My wife was supportive. She didn’t tell me what to do, but she told me now that lots of people were watching my case, I should ‘strongly consider finishing’ what I started.
“That was all I needed. Immediately I knew, I’m not going to back out of this fight.”
According to Kheriaty, the university was, without saying it, hoping he would file a religious exemption, which he never did. “It would have made the case go away, and I would not have gotten fired. But then I would not have had standing to bring the case,” he said.
He said he was “wavering at the end. I asked myself, ‘Is this responsible? I have five kids in private school, two of those in college. I won’t be able to get a job in another hospital having just sued my employer,” he said with a laugh.
Although he lost his case, the university eventually stopped enforcing its vaccine mandate policy.
“I don’t regret it. I would do it again,” said Kheriaty, who is now director of the Bioethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and in private practice.
In the meantime, however, “I had plenty of evidence to show censorship was happening. People told me they couldn’t see things I had just posted on social media [about the vaccine mandates].”
The New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented Hines and Kheriaty, noted in a press release that two related censorship lawsuits remain ongoing: one against the U.S. State Department on behalf of The Federalist and The Daily Wire, and another concerning vaccine-injured individuals censored on Facebook.
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