The black-robed mandarins on the Supreme Court recently voted, on the basis of standing, or lack thereof, that the government is not forbidden from pressuring social media companies to censor material, as happened during the pandemic and around the aftermath of the 2020 election. Justice Alito unloaded on the matter in a scorcher of a dissent.
In the Wednesday opinion, as background, SCOTUS sided with the Biden Administration in a 6-3 vote in Murthy V. Missouri. it found that the two states and five plaintiffs who had been blacklisted by social media companies lacked standing to seek an injunction against the federal governments attempts to suppress speech with which it disagreed by demanding companies like Facebook and Twitter remove content about certain hot-button issues.
Beginning his dissent, Justice Alito wrote, “This case involves what the District Court termed “a farreaching and widespread censorship campaign” conducted by high-ranking federal officials against Americans who expressed certain disfavored views about COVID–19 on social media. Missouri v. Biden, 680 F. Supp. 3d 630, 729 (WD La. 2023).”
He continued, “Victims of the campaign perceived by the lower courts brought this action to ensure that the Government did not continue to coerce social media platforms to suppress speech. Among these victims were two States, whose public health officials were hampered in their ability to share their expertise with state residents; distinguished professors of medicine at Stanford and Harvard; a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine; the owner and operator of a news website; and Jill Hines, the director of a consumer and human rights advocacy organization. All these victims simply wanted to speak out on a question of the utmost public importance.”
Alito, who was joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, then, after describing in detail the government’s many pushes for censorship, argued that SCOTUS justices “are obligated to tackle the free speech issue that the case presents. 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.”
Then, he described the majority’s opinion as abetting unconstitutional actions on the part of the government, saying, “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.”
He also described how the government will use the opinion to engage in far more censorship campaigns, feeling justified in doing so by the opinion. He wrote. “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.”
Legal expert and law professor Jonathan Turley exploded on the majority ruling as well, saying, during a post-ruling release interview on Fox News Channel, that the ruling “made a mockery” of the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of speech. He said, “The Government is engaging in censorship by surrogate… they have made a mockery of the limits of the 1st Amendment.”
Watch him here:
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