By Nate Raymond

WASHINGTON President Joe Biden's administration on Thursday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to put on hold an order restricting the government's ability to encourage social media companies to remove content it considers misleading, including about the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Justice Department asked the justices to stay a lower court's decision finding that federal officials had likely violated the free speech protections of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment by coercing social media platforms into censoring certain posts.

(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)