After three years and one lower court ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit made a significant decision. They ruled that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) violated the First Amendment when it decided to censor specific keywords — like torture, experiment, monkey, and even animals — on its Facebook and Instagram pages, Science reported. This ruling is of immense importance for freedom of speech and animal rights.
The NIH defended its ban on the words, arguing that they were part of “off-topic” subjects and statements. Considering the content of the NIH’s posts, the judges found this unbelievable.
“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,” the judges wrote in the ruling.
The case was brought forward by Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Animal rights advocates Madeline Krasno and Ryan Hartkopf were also central to the case: in 2021, they sued the NIH and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) when they discovered that comments criticizing the agency’s animal testing were hidden if they used certain words. These advocates even resorted to writing animals as ‘an1mals‘ or macaques instead of monkeys to bypass the censorship.
The D.C. Circuit judges also criticized the NIH for what they deemed was an attempt by the government entity to hide opposing viewpoints, which directly contradicts the First Amendment.
“NIH chose to moderate its comment threads in a way that skews sharply against the appellants’ viewpoint that the agency should stop funding animal testing by filtering terms such as ‘torture’ and ‘cruel,’ not to mention terms previously included such as ‘PETA’ and ‘#stopanimaltesting,'” the judges wrote.
Animal testing and experiments are not only brutal and unnecessarily cruel, but also outdated — especially compared to more modern alternatives, such as computer models and human clinical studies. Let the NIH and other government agencies know that you support putting a stop to deadly and unreliable animal testing by signing our petition.
Lady Freethinker commends the judges who saw through the NIH’s attempt to silence those who spoke out against animal experimentation — and applauds everyone speaking out against inhumane animal experimentation.
