With a majority of six out of nine justices, the United States Supreme Court ruled this Wednesday (26) in favor of state agencies (including the FBI) and Biden administration officials who pressured social media platforms to censor alleged misinformation regarding 2020 American presidential elections and the Covid-19 pandemic.
For the court, the plaintiffs — the states of Louisiana and Missouri, and five individuals who felt aggrieved by social media censorship — failed to put the government in the dock, instead of the platforms. “The federal court cannot repair damages that result from the independent action of some third party who is not before the court,” says the decision.
The second problem, according to the ruling, is that the plaintiffs wanted protection from future censorship while failing to prove that they face “a real and immediate threat of the harm recurring.”
“While the record shows that the government had a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation decisions,” the ruling continues, “the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.”
The case had been successful in lower courts. The Supreme Court said those courts had erred in ignoring the complexities of the evidence and in treating both plaintiffs and defendants as unified actors.
For the American ministers, “the complainants generally failed to link the restrictions they suffered on social media to the defendants’ communications with the platforms”.
The individual plaintiffs are doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Aaron Kheriarty; the owner of the news site Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft; and health activist Jill Hines.
The defendants were Vivek H. Murthy, surgeon general (a kind of health minister), White House officials, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA, part of the DHS, an anti-terrorism agency founded two decades ago by George W. Bush).
CISA and the FBI flagged true content about adverse events from Covid-19 vaccines behind the scenes so they could be censored by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and other social media, researchers revealed. Twitter Files from the USA. In the context of the elections, there were even jokes about the exact day of the vote.
Bhattacharya, who teaches at Stanford’s medical school and was one of the creators of the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter that called for less coercive policies to contain Covid-19, commented on the decision on the social network X.
“The Supreme Court ruled (…) that the Biden administration can coerce social media companies to censor and reduce the reach of people and posts that it does not like,” said the doctor. “Congress now needs to act to enforce the Constitution, as the Supreme Court has not done so.”
For the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), specialized in freedom of expression, the American constitutional court “avoided deciding whether government pressure on social media platforms violates the First Amendment” of the Constitution, which protects the right
Despite considering the decision a defeat for free expression, the entity welcomed that the Supreme Court “notes that courts have the power to stop government attempts to pressure social media platforms, when proven. This is important”. FIRE replicates Bhattacharya’s suggestion: “Congress needs to take action.”
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