Supreme Court justices seemed inclined Monday to give the government wide latitude to secretly pressure social media companies to silence dissenting voices, saying officials have the right to strenuously argue their case to the platforms.
Supreme Court justices seemed inclined Monday to give the government wide latitude to secretly pressure social media companies to silence dissenting voices, saying officials have the right to strenuously argue their case to the platforms.
The case grew out of the intense efforts by federal officials to try to police pandemic and election fraud claims they disagreed with, and a challenge by social media users and two GOP-led states who said the feds had crossed lines into coercion by suggesting consequences for platforms that didn’t kowtow.
But many of the justices worried about blocking the FBI from warning platforms about terrorist accounts or a dangerous challenge aimed at teens, and suggested that government officials need to have the ability to flag what they consider worrying content.
“Your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in most important time periods,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told opponents of the federal government’s position. “I’m really worried about that.”
Benjamin Aguiñaga, Louisiana’s solicitor general arguing for the federal government’s opponents, said officials may be able to offer their opinion, but they can’t coerce the platforms to do what the government itself couldn’t do.
“If the government thinks there’s false speech out there, the remedy for that is true speech,” he said.
The case is one of several major tests of social media companies that the justices are deciding this term, as they grapple with claims of free speech, censorship and platforms’ liability.
