The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments last Monday in the landmark First Amendment case of Murthy v. Missouri, in which the states of Missouri and Louisiana alleged in May 2022 that the Biden administration has pressured social media and technology giants to suppress and censor speech on their platforms that didn’t agree with its agenda.
The original complaint states:
[S]enior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “malinformation.”
The case includes areas such as COVID-19 policies – pertaining to masks, lockdowns, and mRNA shots – as well as the 2020 presidential election and circumstances surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Below is a video of Josh Divine, solicitor general for the state of Missouri, who explained in very simple terms the origins and significance of the case.
Citation: Nate Mowry, Missouri Solicitor General Josh Divine on government influence on social media, SCOTUSblog (Mar. 18, 2024, 5:38 PM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/03/missouri-solicitor-general-josh-devine-on-government-influence-on-social-media/
Asked by Nate Mowry of SCOTUSblog about the “implications of a win or a loss on this case,” Divine responded:
A loss in this case would be incredibly difficult because we’ve got a situation here where the Supreme Court has called social media the modern public square. There’s more speech that occurs on social media – on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, etc. – than occurs anywhere else in America. And, so, for you to have a situation where the federal government can come in, and they can just pressure these tech companies, through threats of legal enforcement, through threats of legal consequences – to take down speech that they don’t like – I mean, I think that would be a huge damage to the First Amendment.
Divine provided examples of the various issues included in the alleged suppression – COVID, withdrawal from Afghanistan, “shrinkflation,” etc.
“All of these are really just core issues for the American populace,” he said, adding, “and if you can’t say that freely on social media because the federal government is going to come and censor that, then it’s hard to see what’s left of the First Amendment at that point.”
It’s safe to say, nevertheless, that numerous constitutional legal scholars and journalists expressed concern at the turn taken at oral arguments.
In an op-ed Saturday at The Hill, Jonathan Turley, a nationally recognized legal scholar who writes extensively in the area of constitutional law, wrote the “dangerous triumvirate” of “government, corporate and academic interests have aligned to push limitations of free expression.”
What Turley lamented was hearing “the same voices from our campuses” – part of a “movement to limit free speech under the pretext of combating hate speech or disinformation” – “echoed” on the Supreme Court.
Turley, the author of the soon-to-be-released The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, focused on the “sweeping quality” of remarks by Biden Court nominee Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson:
While her two liberal colleagues suggested that some communications may not be coercive as opposed to persuasive, Jackson would have none of it. She believed that coercion is perfectly fine under the right circumstances, including during periods like a pandemic or other national emergencies claimed by the government. When dangerous information is spotted on social media sites in such periods, she seemed to insist, the government should feel free to “tell them to take it down.”
Turley referred to these comments as “the relativistic views of free speech” that “may now have a new champion on the court.”
“The government loves ambiguity when it comes to speech regulation,” Turley concluded. “It now may have found new voices on the left side of the court to join in the ignoble effort of combating free speech.”
Over at Legal Insurrection, attorney and retired U.S. Navy Captain Jim Nault said, in his view, the case will likely be decided by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Judging from their dissent in October from the Supreme Court’s grant, to the Biden administration, of an immediate stay of U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty’s order asserting the federal government had indeed violated the First Amendment, Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas, Nault wrote, “think that the lower courts’ Injunction Order was proper.”
“The three ‘liberal’ Justices, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, seemed to be squarely on the Government’s side,” he continued, adding:
That leaves Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett, all of whom were very hard to read. Each asked a lot of questions but didn’t seem to tip their respective hands. It’s possible each is still trying to figure out where the line is between coercion (generally bad) and persuasion (generally allowed) between the Government and media companies.
Then, in an op-ed at the New York Post, Benjamin Weingarten, editor-at-large at RealClearInvestigations, wrote what some are fearing: “Disturbingly, the Supreme Court might have bought the government’s argument.”
“That would leave the censorship-industrial complex intact, guaranteeing not only rampant domestic interference in our elections but the death knell of our free-speech rights in the digital public square,” he explained.
In remarks about the oral arguments, Weingarten declared:
Outrageously, the government claimed its purported right to speech would be under threat should the court side with the plaintiffs — a right it acknowledged is not constitutional but part of “democratic governance.”
“It lamented it would be subjected to ‘sprawling audits’ if the standards in the case held and it is subjected to oversight and accountability when it threatens our most basic rights,” he described the federal government’s claim.
Agreeing that while Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch “did not seem favorably disposed to the government’s case,” Weingarten found “Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were more deferential to it, and added: “The case’s outcome therefore — and our right to free speech in the digital public square — is likely to hinge on how they rule.”
These idiots ( Roberts, Kavanaugh, Barrett ) should look at the systematic and totalitarian censorship by western governments against misinformation and disinformation accompanied by life sentences in ( Canada, UK, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand etc ) taking place right now.
Before they allow the government to restrict free speech they better define “hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation “ now and whether it is reasonable to put someone away for life who has engaged in it.