Supreme Court decision means Biden administration can keep talking to social media companies

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Murthy v. Missouri, a case spurred by conservative state attorneys general about whether the Biden administration illegally coerced social media companies to remove speech it didn’t like. In a 6-3 decision, the court reversed the decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had found unconstitutional coercion in the government’s conduct. The Supreme Court held that the plaintiffs did not adequately establish standing — that is, their right to sue in the first place — and has sent the case back to the lower courts, where a new decision will be issued that is consistent with the SCOTUS opinion.

At its core, the case is about whether the Biden administration crossed the line from legal persuasion to illegal coercion in its communications with tech companies about things like voting or health misinformation during the pandemic. During oral arguments this year, several justices seemed uneasy with the idea of placing sweeping restrictions on the government from interacting with social media platforms.

“The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the years-long communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different topics,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the opinion. “This Court’s standing doctrine prevents us from ‘exercis[ing such] general legal oversight’ of the other branches of Government.”

The Supreme Court said that the Fifth Circuit “glossed over complexities in the evidence” by “attributing every platform decision at least in part to the defendants,” meaning the federal government. While the majority opinion acknowledges that the government actors “played a role” at times in some of the social media platform’s content moderation decisions, it says that “the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.”

On top of that, the timing of platforms’ content moderation decisions that were in question cast doubts on the causal relationship between government pressure and the platforms’ choices, according to the court. “Complicating the plaintiffs’ effort to demonstrate that each platform acted due to Government coercion, rather than its own judgment, is the fact that the platforms began to suppress the plaintiffs’ COVID–19 content before the defendants’ challenged communications started,” according to the majority.

They also says the states largely failed to link platforms’ restrictions to the federal government’s communications with the companies. For example, Facebook’s Covid-related restrictions on a “healthcare activist” predated some of the communications the federal government had with the company, according to the court. “Though she makes the best showing of all the plaintiffs, most of the lines she draws are tenuous,” the majority wrote.

Separate from the Supreme Court case, the question about government coercion has also become a focus of the House Judiciary Committee. Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) attended oral arguments in the case and recently released a report with internal communications among high-ranking tech executives about how they responded to government outreach about posts officials deemed harmful to Americans.

This story is developing.