The US Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a Republican-led charge challenging the Biden administration’s deal with social media giants to combat what officials call “misinformation.” Earlier this year it was revealed Biden’s administration and other federal agencies, such as the FBI, told contacts at Facebook and YouTube to target misinformation by taking down posts criticizing the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine and speculating about election fraud. This is one of many cases ascended to the Supreme Court that tackle how the First Amendment is impacted by social media. Republican attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana sued the federal government on the grounds that it violated free speech, per the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The case was dismissed on the grounds that the “plaintiffs lacked standing to sue” because they lacked direct injury, court documents show, per the New York Times. By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court allowed Biden’s misinformation meddling to prevail. “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,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority. “This court’s standing doctrine prevents us from exercising such general legal oversight of the other branches of government.”“For months, high-ranking government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech. Because the court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent," wrote dissenting judge Samuel A. Alito Jr.“Government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government, and therefore today’s decision is highly disturbing.”Louisiana Judge Rep. Terry A. Doughty of the Federal District Court described the lawsuit as “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” and along with a panel of other judges accused the federal government of becoming increasingly entangled with the social media platforms and in some cases using coercion. The panel last year issued an injunction that forbade officials from encouraging or threatening tech giants to remove content it considered “misinformation,” as all content is protected by the First Amendment.The injunction said officials “shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social media companies to remove, delete, suppress or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social media content containing protected free speech.”President Joe Biden in a September emergency application asked for a pause on the injunction, asserting the government had the right to put forth its views and try to persuade people to go along, per the Times. Biden’s application was granted and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
