(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The U.S. Supreme Court announced Friday afternoon that it will hear the landmark Missouri v. Biden case, which stemmed from a lawsuit the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general filed last year against the Biden administration for pressuring tech companies to censor dissident views.
Unfortunately for free speech proponents, SCOTUS also placed a temporary stay on a lower court’s decision to ban the Biden administration from its censorship efforts. A district court had banned Biden from censoring the internet on July 4, and an appeals court largely upheld the ban in September—but SCOTUS overturned both those decisions, at least temporarily.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch all dissented the decision to halt the ban on censorship.
“What the Court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the Government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news,” Justice Alito said in a statement joined by Thomas and Gorsuch.
“Government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government, and therefore today’s decision is highly disturbing.”
Reacting to Friday’s decision, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said he welcomes the opportunity to dismantle Biden’s censorship regime once and for all.
The Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general initially sued the U.S. government in May 2022. They sued Biden, former press secretary Jen Psaki, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Mayorkas, the new director of DHS’ “Disinformation Governance Board” Nina Jankowicz, and others.
The attorneys general argued that Biden and his officials colluded with big tech companies, including Meta, Twitter, and Youtube, to censor truthful information about a range of issues— including the coronavirus, election integrity and Hunter Biden’s laptop—under the guise of combating “misinformation.”
In a landmark ruling released July 4, a lower court agreed with the plaintiffs.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’” U.S. Judge Terry A. Doughty said in his scathing judgment, which granted a injunction on the Biden administration from pressuing social media companies to censor.
Democrats and left-leaning media criticized the ruling at the time, claiming that the judge had a conservative bias. But the Fifth Circuit largely upheld the lower court injunction on Friday.
“Ultimately, we find the district court did not err in determining that several officials—namely the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and the FBI—likely coerced or significantly encouraged social-media platforms to moderate content, rendering those decisions state actions,” the appeals court said.
“In doing so, the officials likely violated the First Amendment.”
In its decision, the appeals court cited numerous examples of the Biden administration acting unconstitutionally.
“For example, one White House official demanded more details and data on Facebook’s internal policies at least twelve times, including to ask what was being done to curtail ‘dubious’ or ‘sensational’ content, what ‘interventions’ were being taken, what ‘measurable impact’ the platforms’ moderation policies had, ‘how much content [was] being demoted,’ and what ‘misinformation’ was not being downgraded,” the justices said.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
