President Biden’s Department of Justice is appealing a ruling by a federal judge in Louisiana that forbids many administration officials from collaborating with social media companies to suppress speech that the government considers problematic.

The judge hearing a lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general alleging that the government routinely colluded with social media companies to tamp down what it deemed “misinformation” about everything from Covid vaccines to the president’s son, Hunter Biden, forbids administration officials from contacting social media companies with the intent of, as the judge put it in his ruling, “encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

The ruling by District Judge Terry Doughty, issued on America’s Independence Day, is being hailed by conservatives as a victory for free speech but lambasted by liberal critics as a dangerous abridgment of the government’s right to police online discourse. The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said, “We certainly disagree with this decision,” but declined to comment further.

Judge Doughty, a conservative appointed to the bench by President Trump, accused the administration of assuming “a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’” in its efforts to squelch skepticism about Covid vaccines during the pandemic and the legitimacy of the presidential election in 2020. He said the evidence presented so far describes an “almost dystopian scenario” in which government officials routinely bullied social media companies into removing content they found objectionable — most of it conservative in viewpoint.

“If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the judge wrote in his ruling. “In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”

The lawsuit names Mr. Biden, Ms. Jean-Pierre, and a host of other administration officials, as well as a number of agencies ranging from the FBI to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as defendants.

The plaintiffs in the case, the states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with several scientists and an online news outlet, allege that, in addition to suppressing speech about Covid vaccines and lockdowns during the pandemic, the defendants cajoled social media companies, such as Twitter and Facebook, into quashing posts about voting by mail, the integrity of the 2020 vote, as well as negative posts about Mr. Biden himself and parody accounts making fun of the named defendants and members of the wider Biden family.

“In addition to misinformation regarding COVID-19, the White House also asked social-media companies to censor misinformation regarding climate change, gender discussions, abortion, and economic policy,” the judge wrote in the 154-page memo attached to the order. “All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech.”

Judge Doughty’s order prohibits the agencies and officials from pressuring social media companies “in any manner” to try to suppress posts going forward, pending further arguments in his court. The justice department has indicated that it will try to stay the ruling pending its appeal to the Fifth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals.

Administration officials and their allies in the press and so-called “disinformation research” circles were caught off-guard by the breadth of the ruling and said government officials should be doing more — not less — to police online speech. One administration official told the Associated Press that the ruling could hamper federal efforts to combat what was described as “domestic extremism” in the run-up to the 2024 election.

“As the U.S. gears up for the biggest election year the internet age has seen, we should be finding methods to better coordinate between governments and social media companies to increase the integrity of election news and information,” a senior counsel of the digital rights advocacy group Free Press, Nora Benavidez, said.

Others said Americans need to remain vigilant about government efforts to encroach on social media platforms. “I’m more concerned that we’re lacking critique in the government’s intervention in these spaces,” a communications professor and social media expert at Syracuse University, Jennifer Grygiel, told the Associated Press. “We need, as a public, to be very critical of any attempts by a government, a federal actor, to censor speech through a corporate entity.”