The National Institutes of Health (NIH) violated the constitutional rights of animal activists by automatically filtering comments containing certain words such as “animal,” a federal appeals court has ruled.
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals group, known as PETA, sued government officials in 2021 after the NIH blocked a number of comments on its social media accounts.
“The NIH routinely hides Plaintiffs’ comments from public view by using keyword blocking tools to prevent certain words and phrases associated with disfavored viewpoints, content, or speakers—like “PETA” and “#stopanimaltesting”—from appearing on its social media pages,” the complaint stated.
Government lawyers argued the NIH using keyword filters to filter out off-topic comments from a limited public fora was reasonable, and U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell agreed.
“NIH has strong legitimate interests in maintaining on-topic discussions in the comment threads of the agency’s social media posts,” she said in a 2023 decision, adding later that the NIH could reasonably conclude that activists’ posts detract from the purpose of the fora.
PETA appealed the ruling, and the appeals court reversed it.
NIH’s use of a lengthy list of keyword filters, which include the words “animal”, “mice”, and “cats”, is not reasonable because many of the agency’s posts feature research conducted using animal experiments or researchers who have carried out such experiments, the appeals court said.
“To say that comments related to animal testing are categorically off-topic when a significant portion of NIH’s posts are about research conducted on animals defies common sense,” Garcia said.
The filtering system is also unreasonable because it is not flexible depending on the content of certain posts or the context in which comments are made, and because there is no manual review of comments to determine if any should be unblocked, according to the ruling.
The NIH did not respond to a request for comment.
The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which brought the suit with PETA, celebrated the decision.
“Today’s ruling is a major victory and reaffirms that the First Amendment forecloses government officials and public agencies from muzzling criticism on their official social media accounts,” Stephanie Krent, a staff attorney with the institute, said in a statement. “The court’s opinion makes clear that officials can’t censor speech just because they disagree with it—and that’s true whether they delete specific comments or rely on digital tools like keyword blocking to do it for them.”
