US Supreme Court rules against Missouri attorney general in social media censorship case

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected arguments by Missouri and Louisiana that the federal government violated the First Amendment in its efforts to combat false, misleading and dangerous information on the Internet.

In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court ruled that neither the states nor the seven people who were co-plaintiffs in the case could show any harm or a significant risk that they would be injured in the future.

Therefore, they do not have the legal standing to bring a case against the federal government.

The plaintiffs failed to prove that the social media platforms operated under government coercion, Barrett wrote, rather than based on their own judgment and policy. In fact, she wrote, social media platforms “began suppressing plaintiffs’ COVID-19 content before defendants’ disputed communications began.”

Plaintiffs cannot “create a standing position,” Barrett wrote, “merely harming themselves based on fear of hypothetical future harm that is certainly not imminent.”

The ruling overturns a lower court decision that found that officials under Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump unlawfully forced social media companies to remove fraudulent or inaccurate content out of fear that it could increase vaccine hesitancy or upend the election. .

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who inherited the lawsuit from his predecessor, called the federal government’s actions “the greatest violation of the First Amendment in our nation’s history.”

But in March, the court viewed those arguments with skepticism, with judges across the ideological spectrum poking holes in the lawsuit and expressing concerns about the consequences for public safety and national security.

In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the government’s actions in this case did not constitute “mass censorship,” which the court routinely rejected, but were nonetheless coercive and illegal.

“It was flagrantly unconstitutional,” he wrote, “and the country may regret that the court did not find so… If the coercive campaign is conducted with sufficient sophistication, it may succeed. That is not the message this court should send.”

In an emailed statement, Bailey made no mention of the court’s decision to dismiss the case, instead saying his office would continue to gather evidence on the federal government’s censorship of social media.

“Missouri is not ready,” Bailey said. “We are going back to the district court for more information and to root out Joe Biden’s massive censorship enterprise once and for all.”

The lawsuit was filed in 2022 by Missouri and Louisiana along with seven people who were banned from the platform or whose posts were not visible on social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube and X, then known as Twitter.

Co-plaintiffs include Jim Hoft, founder of the St.-based right-wing conspiracy website Gateway Pundit. Louis. Hoft has built a career on spreading false conspiracies on a wide range of topics, from the 2018 Parkland school shooting to former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

His company recently filed for bankruptcy amid defamation lawsuits in Missouri and Colorado filed by people claiming they received threats after the Gateway Pundit smeared them in false stories.

During appeals court hearings last year, the attorney general specifically quoted Hoft, saying he was “currently the subject of an ongoing campaign by federal officials to target content on his website.”

Hoft claims that Twitter in December 2020 censored content about Hunter Biden’s laptop story under pressure from the federal government. Barrett, however, wrote that Twitter followed its own rules by prohibiting the posting or sharing of “an individual’s privately produced/distributed intimate media without that individual’s express consent.”

There is no evidence, Barrett wrote, that Twitter adopted its policy in response to pressure from the federal government.

Benjamin Aguiñaga, the Louisiana attorney general’s attorney general, argued to the court in March that the government has no right to try to persuade social media platforms to violate Americans’ constitutional rights, “and pressuring the platforms on a backroom protected from public view is not using the bully’s bully pulpit at all.” . That’s just being a tyrant.”

Aguiñaga argued that emails obtained as part of the lawsuit show the government was slamming the platforms behind closed doors, hurling profanities at them and “ominously saying that the White House was considering its options… all in an effort to get the platforms to censor more speech.” .

“Under this pressure,” he said, “the platforms regularly collapse.”

The federal government, represented by Brian Fletcher, an assistant attorney general, argued that Aguiñaga’s accusations simply had no merit.

There is no evidence that social media companies’ decisions to remove or reprioritize content can be attributed to the government. Instead, Fletcher argued, companies made their own decisions based on their own content moderation policies.

Fletcher said there was no coercion or intimidation, and the best evidence was that social media companies “routinely told the government no.”

This story was originally published by Independent Missouri.