The US Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the Joe Biden administration in a legal row over how the government deals with social media platforms. Republican states had objected to a federal drive against “misinformation,” arguing it amounted to unconstitutional censorship.
The GOP-backed lawsuit was shot down in a 6-3 vote on Wednesday. In the majority opinion, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett argued that the court simply lacked the power to intervene in the government’s exchanges with social media sites.
“The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the yearslong communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different topics,” she wrote. “This court’s standing doctrine prevents us from exercising such general legal oversight of the other branches of government.”
The ruling tossed out a previous decision by a lower court, which had ruled in favor of Republican state attorneys general and a number of private plaintiffs. The case centered on charges that the Biden administration placed undue pressure on internet platforms to stamp out supposed disinformation linked to the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential race, among other issues.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who was a plaintiff in the case, called the new ruling “disappointing,” saying the court gave “a free pass to the federal government to threaten tech platforms into censorship and suppression of speech that is indisputably protected by the First Amendment.”
In a dissent backed by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, Justice Samuel Alito argued Wednesday’s decision “shirks” the court’s duties and slammed the government for placing “unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech.”
“This case involves what the District Court termed ‘a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign’ conducted by high-ranking federal officials against Americans who expressed certain disfavored views about Covid-19 on social media,” Alito added. “If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this court in years.”
The Biden administration’s social media censorship efforts were outlined in a vast trove of documents leaked to journalist Matt Taibbi and other reporters starting in 2022, dubbed the “Twitter Files” The disclosures also covered other social media platforms, and showed a massive federal push to scrub certain content from the internet. The campaign was joined by national security officials, the FBI, and top administration staffers, who regularly forwarded posts and profiles to social media sites for deletion or bans.
Will Porter is assistant news editor at the Libertarian Institute and a regular contributor at Antiwar.com. Find more of his work at Consortium News and ZeroHedge.
