Today, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the plaintiffs did not present sufficient evidence to show that they had standing to sue over allegations that the government violated the First Amendment by communicating with social media companies about misleading and harmful content. on its pages. platforms.
The case was brought by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, who alleged that government agencies have had undue influence on the platforms’ content moderation practices and forced them to remove conservative-leaning content, violating the rights of their users. First Amendment citizens. Specifically, the case alleged that government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) forced social media companies to remove content, including posts questioning the use of masks. to prevent Covid-19 and validity. of the 2020 elections.
In May 2022 statement, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt alleged that members of the Biden administration “colluded with social media companies like Meta, Twitter and YouTube to remove truthful information related to the lab leak theory, the effectiveness of masks, the electoral integrity and more.” Last year, a federal judge issued a court order which prevented the government from communicating with social media platforms.
Today, the court said the plaintiffs could not prove that communications between the Biden administration and social media companies resulted in “direct harm from censorship.” In the majority opinion in Murthy v. Missouri, Judge Amy Coney Barrett wrote that “the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own discretion.”
While it is the government’s responsibility to ensure that it engages with platforms in ways that do not violate free speech (or what is known as “jawboning”), Kate Ruane, director of the free speech project at the Center for Democracy and Technology , says there are very valid reasons why government agencies might need to communicate with the platforms.
“Communication between the government, social media platforms, and government entities is critical to providing information that social media companies can use to ensure that social media users have authoritative information about where they are supposed to go to vote. or what to do in an emergency. , or like all those things,” she says. “It’s very helpful for the government to partner with social media to spread that accurate information.”
David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the court’s decision earlier this cycle in a case called Vulture against the National Rifle Association It was probably a clear indicator of how he would approach the murthy decision. In the Vullo case, the NRA alleged that Maria Vullo, New York Department of Financial Services, pressured banks and insurance companies not to do business with the NRA and suppressed the organization’s defense. In a 9-0 decision, the court ruled that the The NRA had presented enough evidence for the case against Vullo to move forward.. In murthyHowever, the judges found that the plaintiffs had not presented sufficient evidence to show that the government had pressured the platforms to make content moderation decisions.
“Other than the facts involved being politically motivated, the legal issue itself is not something that I think is traditionally divided along partisan lines,” Greene says.
But Greene says that without clear guidelines, state, local and federal government agencies (of all political stripes) might feel freer to contact the platforms now. “We’ll see a lot more of that kind of government involvement in these processes,” he says.
