The Supreme Court has handed a win to the Biden administration in a dispute alleging a mass online censorship campaign by the White House towards social media platforms — holding the states and social media users bringing the challenge didn’t have standing — in one of several landmark social media and First Amendment cases the justices are weighing this term. 

The dispute in the case, Murthy v. Missouri — originally known as Missouri v. Biden — was whether federal bureaucrats violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to remove Covid-era content about masking, vaccines, and the election that it dubbed “misinformation.”

The ruling was six to three, with the opinion written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Chief Justice Roberts. Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented. 

“The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the years-long communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different topics,” the majority opinion notes. “This Court’s standing doctrine prevents us from ‘exercis[ing such] general legal oversight’ of the other branches of Government.” 

Urging tech platforms to crack down on the spread of misinformation in 2021, the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, said in an advisory issued at the time that it was a “serious threat to public health” that can “cause confusion, sow mistrust, harm people’s health, and undermine public health efforts.”

The case — originally brought by Lousiaina and Missouri along with several social media users, including doctors, whose content was removed on social media — argued that by coercing social media platforms to remove their posts, the Biden administration infringed on their First Amendment rights.

A federal district judge in Louisiana, Terry Doughty, blocked some Biden officials from contact with social media platforms for the purpose of moderating or suppressing their content earlier in the case. 

“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,’” Judge Doughty wrote in an opinion last July. “The Plaintiffs have presented substantial evidence in support of their claims that they were the victims of a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign.” 

He said if the allegations against the Biden administration had ultimately proved to be true, it would amount to the “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” After the Fifth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals mostly upheld the district court’s injunction, the Biden administration brought the case to the Supreme Court — which froze the district court’s order while it heard the case. 

During arguments in March, the Biden administration argued that there is a “fundamental distinction between persuasion and coercion,” and said that the government had a right to persuade private platforms from doing something that it cannot do itself, as the Sun reported. The Biden administration also argued that the social media users and states who brought the lawsuit didn’t have standing.

Louisiana’s solicitor general said that the Biden administration “can’t do indirectly what it’s prohibited from doing directly” and said that through 24/7 badgering, unrelenting pressure, and abuse, the government forced the private platforms to cave to its censorship regime. 

While the majority appeared during arguments to be sympathetic to the federal government, Justice Alito pointed out that the Biden administration appeared to be treating social media companies differently than they would treat the traditional press. 

“I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the print media,” he said. “Would you do that to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Associated Press or any other big newspaper or wire service?” 

In a dissent on Thursday, Justice Alito said that “if the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to  reach this Court in years.”

“For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech,” the dissent concludes, noting that the majority “unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment.”