But don’t use government power to coerce

On the grounds that the states bringing the case lacked standing, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the claim that the Biden administration bullied social media companies into removing content the government deemed dangerous. It was a reasonable ruling, but the court could and should have gone further and dismissed the complaint on the merits.

Government officials have the right to pressure journalists, newsrooms and social media companies to promote or even silence certain opinions, provided they do not directly or indirectly threaten them with punishment for disregarding them.

As you might imagine, we speak from experience. We have had many governors, mayors, or federal officials give us hate for something we have published or failed to publish. Sometimes the complaint is shallow, biased, and self-serving; sometimes it is rooted in a serious public policy dispute. Sometimes the public official is polite; sometimes he is less so.

Either way, criticism comes with being in a position of public authority: that goes for the people we elect, and it goes for those who run the news media.

Under the First Amendment, problems only arise when the government threatens, say, to subject a speaker to police action or the Federal Trade Commission action simply because of something he or she said, or to take away a tax break or a contract from the government.

That wasn’t what the higher court case was about. It was about whether the Biden administration acted within its free speech rights when it asked people at X, Facebook, and the like to remove posts containing disinformation about vaccines, the 2020 election, and the like.

No public sector employee said, “Nice little company, shame if something happened to it.” They simply expressed, often forcefully, a belief that disinformation can be harmful to democracy or public health—which, um, is true.

In the midst of a pandemic, when the lives of millions of people are at risk, it is entirely reasonable for the government to take a firm stand against those who spread messages that undermine public confidence in vaccines or spread baseless conspiracies that make the disease more likely to spread freely. Indeed, it is responsible. Where the right sees conspiracy, we see a government with strong convictions that wants social media policy to honestly implement principles it has, in many cases, already adopted.

We also shouldn’t miss the irony: a case challenging the Biden administration on these principles went all the way to the Supreme Court, while during the Trump administration, the leader openly called the media the enemy of the people for daring to report on things he disagreed with.

If and when the Biden administration, or any other administration, demands that a social media company silence an account or faces the wrath of the federal government, that will be a different matter entirely — and we will almost certainly side with the recipient.

However, criticism is not a consequence of public policy.