The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, a case concerning government communications with social media companies, and whether those communications amount to censorship. The justices seem opposed to the plaintiff’s arguments that the government’s efforts to combat online misinformation about COVID-19 and U.S. elections constituted censorship.
Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten attended the hearings and emerged deeply concerned about the direction the justices seemed to be taking. Weingarten fears that Americans’ First Amendment rights are under significant threat.
Evidence in Murthy revealed that leading up to the 2020 election, and increasingly thereafter, federal agencies directly and by cut-out cajoled, coerced and colluded with social media platforms to censor wrong-thinking Americans, at the level of millions of posts, on matters ranging from the Hunter Biden laptop story to the integrity of mass mail-in balloting and [the] efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
Lower courts found that these efforts likely constituted a massive assault on the First Amendment. The feds, they said, effectively turned Facebook and Twitter into its speech police — state actors whose content moderation efforts violated the Constitution by abridging our speech. So the courts issued a preliminary injunction freezing the speech-policing during the case.
The feds took their case to the Supreme Court. They said restrictions on their ability to press social media companies to censor so-called mis-, dis- and mal-information would irreparably harm them, violating their right to speak and influence the digital public square. They asked the court to bless the fed censorship regime and allow it to persist.
I walked out of oral arguments demoralized that the justices might have bought the government’s anti-free speech pitch. While oral arguments don’t necessarily reflect how the court will come down on a case, the great deference to the government’s position that essentially the bar has to be very high to say the feds converted social media companies into federal speech suppression weapons, shown particularly by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett, the three apparent swing votes here, gives me great pause.