A federal judge's order last week effectively barring the federal government from coordinating with social media companies to counter big lies online pits two important imperatives against one another: confronting widespread disinformation, and protecting freedom of speech.

The order, in a case with roots in Missouri, comes down almost entirely on the side of the latter, to the point that, if it stands, it could create a scenario in which the government might be unable to even call out dangerous disinformation for fear of being accused of censoring free speech.

That's the wrong balance — but a balance is needed. This is a much more complicated issue than either side of the debate seems ready to admit.

The order, issued Tuesday in a federal lawsuit brought by Missouri and Louisiana, restricts the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms about a vast range of topics, and from "urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech."

When people claim in online forums that, for example, vaccines and masking don't work, or that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, they are on one hand expressing personal, constitutionally protected opinions. But they are also spreading false and dangerous misinformation.

Yet the core allegation of the suit — that the government is effectively using its relationship with social media companies to engage in the kind of speech suppression by proxy that it couldn't legally engage in directly — is difficult to completely dismiss.

Missouri signed on as one of the original lead plaintiffs under then-Attorney General Eric Schmitt (now the state's junior senator), whose relentless campaign of pandemic-era lawsuits against Missouri schools over their masking policies was a divisive and dangerous distraction at a time when schools needed to be able to focus on getting through the crisis.

Among other plaintiffs is Jim Hoft, founder of the St. Louis-based far-right site Gateway Pundit, which traffics in toxic conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and vaccines that are so out-there they would be funny if not for their reach.

The plaintiffs appear to have an ideological ally in U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty of Louisiana, who handed down last week's ruling. A Donald Trump appointee, Doughty has shown in the past a willingness to entertain some of the most mischievous nonsense of the culture wars, including the thoroughly debunked claim that COVID vaccines don't work.

Some of the more histrionic portions of Doughty's opinion in the current case read like something overheard at a Trump rally. "If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true," he writes, "the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history."

It's clearly not that. For one thing, the social media platforms themselves aren't beholden to the White House for their ability to operate. That ability is written into Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It gives internet platforms immunity from legal liability for what their users write. It's a unique shield that traditional media (such as this newspaper) doesn't have.

The long-accepted tradeoff for that freedom is that the platforms are expected to self-police in good faith for dangerous content on their sites. Contrary to what so many conservatives seem to believe, they have every legal right to do that as private entities not governed by the First Amendment. For a presidential administration to merely point out that a platform is harboring material that its own stated policies prohibit doesn't at first glance sound like censorship.

But the form of that relationship, as laid out in Doughty's ruling, contains some details that should worry anyone who views governmental intrusion into the realm of free speech as generally a greater danger than whatever danger it's trying to confront.

This wasn't merely a matter of the administration occasionally calling a platform's attention to something problematic on its sites that it might have missed. The case has highlighted the fact that Twitter (prior to Elon Musk's purchase of it last year) gave the White House a special portal to quickly flag problematic posts for the company.

From a government-intrusion standpoint, that's a problem, even if most of what the government was flagging was genuine and dangerous public-health misinformation.

More of a problem still is that Twitter in some instances removed posts after administration complaints about things that weren't dangerous, but merely embarrassing to the White House. These include a parody account by Hunter Biden's daughter and a doctored video of Jill Biden that made it look like she'd been profane toward a group of students.

And therein lies the problem with even well-intentioned governmental involvement in monitoring free speech: By its nature, government won't limit its own power to legitimate criterion. Ironically enough, no one has demonstrated that principle more vividly than lead plaintiff Schmitt while he was Missouri's attorney general.

None of this is to say the current order will, or should, stand on appeal as written. Legal scholars have been savage in their assessment of it, and even a layman's reading of the ruling can recognize it is largely a culture-war manifesto dressed up as a legal opinion.

But the underlying question — whether and how the federal government should engage with social media companies to confront disinformation — is one that needs to be addressed regardless of the ultimate outcome of this case. Traditional liberals, true libertarians and, yes, this newspaper have long warned of the danger of government regulation of speech. That danger doesn't evaporate just because the regulation is indirect and the speech in question is toxic.

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