By PRINCE ODETA.
The Supreme Court is set to rule on a critical free speech issue concerning whether the federal government can leverage private entities, such as major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now known as X), and YouTube, to suppress dissenting opinions—a move that would blatantly violate the First Amendment if done directly by the government.
On October 20, the Supreme Court agreed to review a decision by the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Murthy v. Missouri.
The unanimous panel of the court had found that various government officials, including those from the Biden administration, had exerted pressure on social media platforms to censor political speech that disagreed with the administration’s positions on issues such as COVID-19, the 2020 election, and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
President Biden had openly criticized Facebook in July 2021 for allowing posts that challenged COVID-19 measures, leading Meta, Facebook’s parent company, to promise a crackdown on such content.
Additionally, the FBI had been monitoring social media platforms to remove posts about election-rigging or to restrict the visibility of those who posted such content.
The Fifth Circuit’s ruling, based on a district court’s findings, recounted the government’s increasing pressure on social media companies to remove content contradicting the official narrative.
The plaintiffs included both a conservative pundit and respected medical school professors, along with a health care activist and two states, Missouri and Louisiana, emphasizing their citizens’ right to access information.
Despite the Biden administration’s assertions, mounting evidence suggests that lockdowns, masks, and vaccines have limited impact on curbing COVID-19.
However, the First Amendment protects the dissemination of even false information, as long as it is not defamatory.
Records and messages discovered by lawyers representing the plaintiffs uncovered that the White House and the Surgeon General’s office initially began flagging content and instructing tech companies to remove it.
Later, they progressed to closely monitoring the companies’ moderation policies, followed by persistently pressuring them for not taking sufficient measures to address “vaccine hesitancy.”
By July 2021, when President Biden made his controversial “killing people” statement, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy publicly criticized the platforms as a major obstacle to controlling COVID-19.
He demanded that they take action against those spreading misinformation. Soon after, a White House official mentioned that they were examining the legal liability of the platforms and emphasized the need for holding them accountable.
According to the Fifth Circuit, the tech companies surrendered at each juncture, likely due to fear or a desire to appease.
While the court upheld an injunction barring the Biden administration from continuing its intimidation campaign, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, granted the Justice Department’s request to temporarily halt the injunction until the case’s resolution, likely in 2024.
The administration contends that its actions over the past three years were merely a form of “jawboning,” where the President and lawmakers use implied threats to influence policies without direct legal authority.
President Kennedy’s pressure on steelmakers in 1962 serves as a classic example of this tactic.
However, the practice of jawboning becomes more alarming when it targets third parties, attempting to limit their speech by utilizing other companies as intermediaries.
In such cases, the law seems to require the government’s actions to constitute coercion or control.
The Fifth Circuit discovered significant evidence of this coercion in the Biden administration’s overt scheme of outsourcing censorship over the last three years.
It is regrettable that the majority of the Supreme Court allowed this to continue into the Election Year of 2024, as noted by Justice Samuel Alito in his dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.
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