Supreme Court hears free speech case involving the Biden administration’s efforts to pressure social media companies to remove content it said spread false information.
The Supreme Court on Monday is hearing arguments in a case that tests how far the federal government can go in pressuring social media companies to remove content it believes spreads misinformation before it crosses a constitutional line.
The case, known as Murthy v. Missouri, arose out of efforts during the early months of the Biden administration to push social media platforms to take down posts that officials said spread falsehoods about the pandemic and the 2020 presidential election.
A U.S. district court judge said White House officials, as well as some federal agencies and their employees, violated the First Amendment’s right to free speech by « coercing » or « significantly encouraging » social media sites’ content-moderation decisions.
The legal battle is one of five that the Supreme Court is considering this term that stand at the intersection of the First Amendment’s free speech protections and social media. But it is the first of two that the justices will hear when they take the bench Monday that involves alleged jawboning, or informal pressure by the government on an intermediary to take certain actions that will suppress speech.
The second case raises whether a New York financial regulator when she pressured banks and insurance companies in the state to sever ties with the gun rights group after the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Florida.
Decisions from the Supreme Court in both cases are expected by the end of June.The Biden administration’s efforts to stop misinformation
The court is hearing arguments first in the case stemming from the Biden administration’s efforts to pressure platforms including Twitter, now known as X, YouTube and Facebook, to take down posts it believed spread falsehoods about the pandemic and about the last presidential election.
Brought by five social media users and two states, Louisiana and Missouri, their challenge claimed their speech was stifled when platforms removed or downgraded their posts after strong-arming by officials in the White House, Centers for Disease Control, FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
The challengers alleged that at the heart of their case is a « massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise,' » through which federal officials communicated with social media platforms with the goal of pressuring them to censor and suppress speech they disfavored.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty found that seven groups of Biden administration officials violated the First Amendment because they transformed the platforms’ content-moderation decisions into state action by « coercing » or « significantly encouraging » their activities. He agencies and their employees could have with the platforms, but included several carve-outs.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit then determined that certain White House officials and the FBI violated free speech rights when they coerced and significantly encouraged platforms to suppress content related to COVID-19 vaccines and the election.
