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The ruling, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, was another twist in a First Amendment case that has challenged the government’s ability to combat false and misleading narratives about the pandemic, voting rights and other issues that spread on social media.

The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, both Republicans, argued in a lawsuit filed last year that government agencies and officials — including some working in the administration of President Donald J. Trump — had abused their authority by coercing companies like Facebook, Twitter (now called X) and YouTube to silence critics.

Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, noted recently that Mr. Trump’s White House had asked the company in 2019 to remove a tweet in which the model Chrissy Teigen called the president several expletives.

Many of the cases cited in the legal challenge involved the Covid pandemic, when government officials feared that misinformation and disinformation about vaccines and other treatments hampered efforts to control the spread of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 1.1 million Americans.

“Never in the history of this country have federal officials worked so blatantly in collusion with industry to silence the voices that question government agendas,” Mr. Kennedy, who leads the Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization, said in a statement ahead of the appellate hearing in New Orleans.

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, an advocacy group, argued in an amicus brief to the appellate court that the judge’s injunction was so broadly and vaguely written that it would “chill critical information sharing” among researchers, companies and government officials before the 2024 presidential election.

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