WASHINGTON, DC – Despite fierce opposition from conservatives, a divided Supreme Court has ruled that social media companies like Facebook are free to continue censoring conservatives.
“During the 2020 election season and the COVID-19 pandemic, social media platforms frequently removed, demoted, or fact-checked posts containing allegedly false or misleading information,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said. Began For the majority. “At the same time, federal officials were concerned about the spread of ‘misinformation’ on social media and communicated extensively with the platforms about their content moderation efforts.”
Barrett presented facts from a variety of officials from the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Surgeon General, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“The platforms restricted Plaintiffs’ content, but Plaintiffs allege that the federal government was behind it,” Barrett explained. “Based on that belief, Plaintiffs have sued dozens of executive branch officials and agencies, alleging that they pressured the platforms to censor Plaintiffs’ speech in violation of the First Amendment.”
“We start and end with standing to sue,” she asserted. “At this stage, neither the individual plaintiffs nor the state have established standing to seek an injunction against the defendants. Therefore, we lack jurisdiction to get to the heart of the dispute.”
Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett listens to testimony during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2020. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times, Kyodo via Associated Press)
The majority found that the plaintiffs had failed to prove they suffered legal damage caused by Facebook and the former Twitter Inc., and that the damage was caused by coercion by the Biden administration and could be resolved by the court issuing an injunction.
“Plaintiffs are asking the Court to investigate years of communications between dozens of federal employees at various agencies on a variety of social media platforms about a variety of topics, despite the lack of a specific connection between their injuries and Defendants’ conduct,” the majority concluded. “Our standing principles preclude such general judicial oversight of other government agencies.”
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote a scathing dissent, joined by fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas and libertarian-leaning Justice Neil Gorsuch.
“The victims of this campaign, which the courts below recognized, have brought this lawsuit to ensure that the government cannot continue to force social media platforms to suppress speech,” Justice Alito said. “All of these victims simply wanted to speak out about an issue of vital public importance.”
“If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this will be one of the most significant free speech cases to come before this Court in years,” Justice Alito declared. “While free speech has many worthy purposes, its most important role is to protect speech that is essential to democratic self-governance and that advances the body of human knowledge, thought, and expression in such fields as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts.”
“Our nation’s response to COVID-19 is a matter of enormous medical, social, political, geopolitical and economic importance, and our nation’s commitment to a free marketplace of ideas demands that dissent on these matters be permitted,” he said in a statement. “I believe that a significant portion of what social media users have said about COVID-19 and the pandemic has been of little lasting value.”
“Some of it was undoubtedly untrue or misleading, some may have been outright dangerous,” Alito noted, “but we now know that it also suppressed valuable speech, as is inevitably the case when entry into the marketplace of ideas is restricted.”
“Of course, entirely private organizations like newspapers are not subject to the First Amendment, so they can publish or refuse to publish whatever they want,” he acknowledged, “but government authorities cannot force private organizations to suppress speech, and that is exactly what happened in this case.”
“But the Court has failed in its duty and accepted the successful enforcement campaign in this case as an attractive model for future officials wishing to control what the public says, hears, and thinks,” the dissent further stated for the Court’s majority.
“What the authorities did in this case was more subtle than the clumsy censorship allegedly unconstitutional. VulloBut it was no less binding,” Alito noted, noting the NRA’s recent big win against New York, adding:
And it was even more dangerous because of the perpetrator’s high status. It was clearly unconstitutional, and the country may end up regretting that the court did not say so. An official who read the ruling today said: Vullo The message will get across. With a sophisticated enough enforcement campaign, it might get through. That is not the message this court should be sending.
“These events demonstrate sustained and relentless pressure from federal officials on Facebook to crack down on what they viewed as unhelpful social media posts,” Alito continued, “not only posts they deemed false or misleading, but also stories they did not claim were literally false but that they nonetheless wanted to cover up.”
Justice Alito focused on the First Amendment standard at issue, citing precedent and arguing that “freedom of speech does not permit the prohibition of speech, whether the government engages in censorship itself or uses a third party to do something the Constitution prohibits.”
“For months, government officials have relentlessly pressured Facebook to stifle Americans’ free speech,” Justice Alito concluded. “Because the Supreme Court has unjustly refused to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent.”
Breitbart News senior legal contributor Ken Kurkowski is a former White House and Justice Department lawyer. Follow us on X (formerly Twitter) Kenkrukowski.
