US election live updates: Trump launches intense campaign push, Biden hammers him on Covid

For the second time in two months, a panel of federal judges on Thursday blocked President Donald Trump's effort to exclude people in the US illegally from being counted during the process of divvying up congressional seats by state. The decision from a panel of three district judges in California went further than last month's ruling by a panel of three federal judges in New York by saying that Trump's order in July not only was unlawful but also violated the Constitution. The New York judges ignored the question of the order's constitutionality and just said it was unlawful.

The GOP push against Facebook and Twitter accelerated Thursday after Republican senators threatened the CEOs of the social media companies with subpoenas to force them to address accusations of censorship in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign. With Democrats boycotting the hearing, the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee voted to authorize the legal orders if Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey did not agree to testify voluntarily.

President Donald Trump has made his war on Big Tech a central piece of his reelection campaign. For months, he has accused Facebook and Twitter of attempting to rig the election by silencing criticism about his rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and called for new regulations to rein in Silicon Valley giants. But Trump is far from muzzled online. In fact, in recent weeks, he has widened his social media engagement lead over Biden.In the past 30 days, Trump’s official Facebook page has gotten 130 million reactions, shares and comments, compared with 18 million for Biden’s page, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned data platform. That is significantly larger than the engagement gap for the preceding 30-day period, when Trump got 86 million interactions to Biden’s 10 million.