In a 6-3 decision penned by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court has sided with the Biden administration, "rejecting a Republican challenge that sought to prevent the government from contacting social media platforms to combat what it said was misinformation," The New York Times reported. - "Andrew Bailey, Missouri's attorney general, said he would continue to try 'to build the wall of separation between tech and state. The record is clear: The deep state pressured and coerced social media companies to take down truthful speech simply because it was conservative,' he said in a statement. 'Today's ruling does not dispute that.'"
In a lengthy dissent, Justice Samuel Alito took issue with the High Court's decision, arguing that by siding with the Biden administration, the majority has abandoned their constitutional duty to prevent the federal government from engaging in similar behaviors in the future: - "The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think. That is regrettable. What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators' high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court's failure to say so. Officials who read today's decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send."
When the case was first being heard in March, Aaron Kheriarty observed how "the government's relationship with social media is not analogous to government interactions with print media." - "But the power dynamic is entirely different with Facebook, Google, and X (formerly Twitter): The government does have a sword of Damocles to hang over the head of noncompliant social media companies if they refuse to censor — in fact, several swords, including the threat to remove Section 230 liability protections, which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has accurately called an 'existential threat' to their business, or threats to break up their monopolies. As the record in our lawsuit shows, the government explicitly made just such threats, even publicly on several occasions, in direct connection to their censorship demands."
Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO), who filed the initial lawsuit as Attorney General of Missouri, argued Murthy v. Missouri represented one of the most consequential cases to date as it pertains to censorship, speech rights, and social media platforms — and the federal government's relationship to all three. - "This lawsuit exposed an unprecedented 'censorship enterprise' in which Biden White House officials relentlessly pressured social media companies to remove posts or accounts and more strictly censor speech related to certain topics. Court documents unveiled a coordinated effort by executive branch employees, most notably Dr. Anthony Fauci, to discredit the "lab-leak theory" that the origins of COVID-19 stemmed from gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China. After Fauci's extensive efforts to discredit and suppress that theory, Facebook expanded its content moderation to censor posts suggesting COVID-19 might have been man-made. Documents obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government paint an even clearer picture."
Big Government and Big Tech won this round. However, the issue of free speech rights in the age of Big Tech will not disappear — if anything, it will become more urgent as a growing share of public discourse migrates into the digital sphere.
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