Major U.S. Court Says NIH Violated the First Amendment Rights of Animal Testing Critics

In a historic win for PETA, free speech, and government accountability, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) violated the First Amendment by blocking criticism of animal testing. The decision comes in response to a lawsuit brought by lawyers at the PETA Foundation, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and the Animal Legal Defense Fund on behalf of PETA and an individual activist. It says NIH’s current and past blocking of keywords—including “monkey(s),” “cats,” “mouse,” “experiment,” “testing,” “PETA,” “torture,” and “revolting”—on its social media pages is illegal. This landmark decision reinforces that NIH can no longer distort public discourse over its work by censoring critics of cruel, pointless experiments on animals. Since, as the court explained, allowing NIH to block “words related to animal testing [as] categorically off-topic … defies common sense.”