SCOTUS Rejects First Amendment Challenge to Alleged Social Media Censorship by Federal Government

The Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling Wednesday declaring a lack of standing in the case against the members of the federal government, including the Biden Administration, for allegedly violating American’s First Amendment rights by pressuring social media companies to censor certain speech.

Authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the majority opinion asserts that neither the states nor the individuals who brought the case had standing to sue the federal government and seek an injunction.

Because the case was decided on the basis of standing, the Court did not directly weigh in on the First Amendment issues raised related to government-directed social media censorship that are raised by this case.

The complaint at the heart of this case alleged that starting in 2018, members of federal agencies and later the Biden Administration urged social media platforms to “censor disfavored speech and speakers” and were “threaten[ing] adverse consequences” to those who refused “to increase censorship.”

Those named in the suit were accused of working to suppress speech on social media related to: “the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 Presidential election,” “the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin,” “the efficiency of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns,” “the efficiency of COVID-19 vaccines,” “election integrity in the 2020 presidential election,” “the security of voting by mail,” “parody content” about those named in the suit, “the economy,” and “negative posts about President Biden.”

[RELATED: SCOTUS Considers if Government Involvement in Social Media Content Moderation Violates Users’ First Amendment Rights]

According to the majority opinion, those who filed the complaint failed to provide sufficient evidence to establish standing and be granted an injunction.

“To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek,” Justice Barrett wrote. “Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”

“Though the platforms restricted the plaintiffs’ content, the plaintiffs maintain that the Federal Government was behind it,” the majority opinion explained. “Acting on that belief, the plaintiffs sued dozens of Executive Branch officials and agencies, alleging that they pressured the platforms to censor the plaintiffs’ speech in violation of the First Amendment.”

“We begin—and end—with standing,” said the majority.

“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,” the opinion concludes. “This Court’s standing doctrine prevents us from ‘exercis[ing such] general legal oversight’ of the other branches of Government.”

[RELATED: Biden Administration “Likely” Violated the First Amendment By Pressuring Social Media Companies to Censor American Citizens, According to Court of Appeals]

Dissenting from the majority were Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas.

In their dissent, the Justices argue that the majority erred in declaring a lack of standing and referred to the government’s conduct as “blatantly unconstitutional.”

“All these victims simply wanted to speak out on a question of the utmost public importance,” said the dissenting Justices. “If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years.”

“Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government, and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts,” they wrote. “The speech at issue falls squarely into those categories.”

“What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in [a prior case], but it was no less coercive,” the Justices said. “And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous.”

“It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Officials who read today’s decision together with [our prior decision] will get the message,” they argue. “If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send.”

“For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech,” the dissenting Justices conclude. “Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent.”

Click Here to Read the Supreme Court’s Full Opinion