The Supreme Court of the United States will hear arguments concerning President Joe Biden’s administration’s ability to communicate with social media companies about their content moderation policies.
Last year, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana along with five plaintiffs accused high-ranking public officials of colluding with social media giants like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter under the guise of combatting misinformation. The attorneys general believe that this “combating misinformation” led to censoring free speech.
“I think it is absolutely critical that that injunction be affirmed as we move into this election cycle in order to continue to build the wall of separation between tech and state, in order to protect our election and integrity as part of our First Amendment right to free speech,” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey told Fox News.
“In other words, if you look at the speech that was suppressed, censored at the federal government’s demand, it was exclusively conservative speech,” Bailey continued.
Many Americans still have no idea this happened https://t.co/JBDGF85SBN
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2024
A federal district judge and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals largely agreed with the conservative attorneys general as they imposed broad limits on interactions between the federal government and social media companies.
The White House appealed those decisions stating that public officials are and should be free “to inform, to persuade and to criticize” social media platforms and their policies.
On July 4, a district court issued a temporary injunction preventing White House officials from meeting with tech companies about moderating content. In October, the appeals court extended the scope of the injunction to include the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security.
When the Court agreed to hear the case, the court also lifted the temporary injunction until a final decision is made. The dissenting justices, Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch, forcefully dissented the lifting of the injunction.
“At this time in the history of our country, 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,” Alito wrote in his dissenting opinion. “That is most unfortunate.”
The court will hear arguments on Monday morning to decide if the injunction should remain in place until the case is decided. It is expected that the final decision will be made in late June, just a few months before the November election.
