Supreme Court Dances Around the Government's Role in Censoring Social Media

The Court Acknowledged that the Government has coerced Tech Platforms, but Tossed the Case on Legalistic Issues

Last Week, several opinions came down from the Supreme Court. One of those opinions was Biden vs. Murthy which was a case brought to challenge the Biden’s administration’s censorship complex. Soon after Elon Musk bought X (formerly Twitter), He compiled emails showing how US intelligence agencies were coercing major social media platforms to remove posts they didn’t want in the public’s view. Many of the posts taken down were about Covid, the Hunter Biden laptop story and anything deemed to be “Russian disinformation” (which essentially means anything that runs contrary to establishment views).

We were told by the mainstream media not to worry about this Twitter file dump, It’s a “nothing burger”. Yet before we could even take a bite from the nothing burger, the journalists chosen to dissect and report on the dump were required to testify in congress about it. The nothing burger quickly became a Big Mac. The Big mac ended up as the catalyst for a supreme court case.

Elon Musk provided the twitter dump to

Matt Taibbi

and Michael Shellenberger. The dump showed flagrant violations of the first amendment. A legal case, Biden vs. Missouri (now Murthy vs. Missouri) presented vast evidence from the Twitter dump that showed the public sector coercing Big Tech firms to remove content it found objectionable. This case was heard in the United States Federal District for Louisiana. The judge, Terry A. Doughty, issued a 155-page decision, calling the actions “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history”. Doughty ordered an injunction to stop the government from interfering. The ruling was upheld by an appellate court. The panel of judges vacated some of the lower court’s decision, because parts were found to be redundant, but the main points were left intact. The case headed for the Supreme Court where it was heard in March. It was tossed out last week.

The Mainstream Media claimed the court dismissed the case because there wasn’t enough evidence to support the plaintiffs’ claims. This is false. The Supreme court didn’t challenge the unconstitutionality of the government’s actions, or intelligence agency conduct. On the contrary, the opinion written by Amy Coney Barrett goes into great detail that support the argument that there was government interference:

[The White House} expressed concern that Facebook in particular was “one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy,” due to the spread of allegedly false or misleading claims on the platform. App. 659–660. Thus, the officials peppered Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Twitter and YouTube) with detailed questions about their policies, pushed them to suppress certain content, and sometimes recommended policy changes. Some of these communications were more aggressive than others. For example, the director of Digital Strategy, frustrated that Facebook had not removed a particular 4 MURTHY v. MISSOURI Opinion of the Court post, complained: “[L]ast time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection.”

And:

Another [white house] official, unhappy with Facebook’s supposed lack of transparency about its vaccine misinformation problems, wrote: “Internally we have been considering our options on what to do about it.” Id., at 657. Publicly, White House communications officials called on the platforms to do more to address COVID–19 misinformation—and, perhaps as motivation, raised the possibility of reforms aimed at the platforms, including changes to the antitrust laws and 47 U. S. C. §230.

What was the actual ruling by the court?

The Court ruled that since social media platforms have been censored by a combination of their own content moderation and government coercion, the plaintiff would need to prove that in their specific cases they were censored by government forces, and not by the platforms moderation policies. The opinion stated the plaintiffs could not “trace” their complaint to the government. But there is more.

Glenn Greenwald

, journalist and constitutional lawyer further explained that the Court is limited to cases where one party is suing another for damages, and not to be a “floating arbiter of right or wrong”. For example, a citizen cannot sue the government because they vehemently object to a law. They can only sue if they believe they have suffered a loss due to the law. There needs to be a “controversy” between parties. This is called “standing”, and the case was tossed due to “lack of standing”. The argument was that since the plaintiffs couldn’t trace their complaints to the government, in effect there was no controversy, therefore, no standing.

But this is not a case of simply protesting a law. There are damages. There is a loss and there is certainly valid controversy. The damage and loss are to our democracy and freedom, which the Supreme Court is supposed to uphold and protect. The court stretched the law to sidestep a serious situation and ruled in way that is not in the best interests of our society as a whole. The public sector interfering and coercing the private sector to take action is one of the definitions of fascism.

Greenwald went on to say that the court has used this strategy in the past. One example he cited is a Supreme Court case heard after the Snowden documents revealed that Homeland Security was spying on its own citizens. Citizens sued the government for surveilling them. In that case, the ruling was similar to this current censorship case. The court ruled that since the list of who has been under surveillance is secret, citizens cannot prove that they have been surveilled, therefore there is no controversy. This is a strategy that the court uses to protect the government and let them keep their most wretched domestic policy in place.

Once the court established lack of standing, no other part of the case was ruled on. Clearly, government induced censorship is a violation of the first amendment. The government imposed its will on Big Tech platforms to strong arm them to remove content.

The list of plaintiffs is impressive. The dissenting opinion shows that the plaintiffs are from:

“two States, whose public health officials were hampered in their ability to share their expertise with state residents; distinguished professors of medicine at Stanford and Harvard; a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine; the owner and operator of a news website; and Jill Hines, the director of a consumer and human rights advocacy organization. “

What did the victims want?

All these victims simply wanted to speak out on a question of the utmost public importance.

It’s tantalizing that the court would spell out so much detail about government actions, only to say “well, we are not going to deal with any of this”.

A little insight into how the court thinks: they bought the mainstream narrative, such as the government protecting against “Russian disinformation”, which has been shown to be vastly overinflated. The court also claims that the Hunter laptop was only discovered to be real after the election, but that is not true. It was authenticated well before the election, as many independent journalists have shown.

Here are some examples of the extent of the government actions:

Elvis Chan, an FBI agent who had monthly meetings with Big Tech platforms such as Twitter was deposed by the state of Missouri Attorney General Eric Schimdt (Now a US senator). After the deposition Schimdt reported the following on Twitter:

Justice Samual Alito wrote the dissenting opinion. His opinion was that the case should have been ruled on the substance of first amendment violations. He states:

The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think. That is regrettable. What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.

By not hearing the actual case, the court has enabled the censorship state to continue to mold big tech platforms to serve elites interests. Those who oppose the Ukrainian war and place the blame for the war squarely on the shoulders of the West have been censored as Russian disinformation. Those who protest the genocide in Gaza have also been censored on the grounds that it is antisemitic to criticize Israeli policy. This trend will only continue, and even get worse. In his dissenting opinion, Alito noted that social media firms are more vulnerable than newspapers or TV news. Social media companies are currently shielded by law protecting them from liability from customer posts. Also, there is the threat of anti-trust suits being raised. Mark Zuckerberg has said an anti-trust suit would be an “existential threat to Facebook’s existence” The White House holds the threat of changing these laws over the heads of social media companies like the sword of Damocles.

It is not the job of the government to determine what is objectively true or false. Trying to do so is an abuse of power. It is the job of the government to promote democratic debate, and let the people decide what’s true. Stifling opinions only leads to suspicion, skepticism and a sick society. Can anyone name a time in history when the censors were the good guys?