SCOTUS Sides With Biden in Conservative Social Media Censorship Case
By Movieguide® Contributor
The Supreme Court sided with President Biden and his administration on Wednesday regarding social media posts about COVID-19 and election security.
By a 6-3 vote, the court ruled that “the plaintiffs, a group of conservative states and social media users, had no standing to sue the federal government over its attempts to influence the censorship policies of social media giants,” Fox News reported.
AP News added that the plaintiffs believe the Biden administration “leaned on the social media platforms to unconstitutionally squelch conservative points of view.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “The challengers argued that unfettered speech on social media is critical to their work as scientists, pundits and activists,” USA Today reported.
“But they do not point to any specific instance of content moderation that caused them identifiable harm,” she wrote. “They have therefore failed to establish an injury that is sufficiently ‘concrete and particularized.’”
However, Justice Samuel Alito objected, saying that “the majority unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment.”
“For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech,” he continued. Alito, along with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, dissented.
Evidence for social media’s impact on the 2020 election is evident. Movieguide® reported:
…Conservative circles were abuzz from the fallout of Twitter and Facebook’s decision to actively censor a major American Newspaper.
On October 14, [2020,] “America’s oldest newspaper,” the New York Post, published a story about damaging material found on a laptop that reportedly belonged to Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The two social media giants both chose to immediately remove any post that shared New York Post articles.
Despite the outright censorship, the story went viral. The article had nearly 5 million views on the NYP’s website as of Wednesday afternoon.
A survey conducted in 2022 found that “79% overall said it was ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ likely that ‘a truthful interpretation of the laptop’ would have resulted in the reelection of former President Donald Trump instead of the election of President Biden,” the New York Post reported.
However, this week, the six remaining justices favored the Biden administration, claiming the challengers did not “show enough of a connection between the Biden administration’s communications with social media companies and restrictions on their postings.”
“To be sure, the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices,” Barrett explained. “But the Fifth Circuit, by attributing every platform decision at least in part to the defendants, glossed over complexities in the evidence.”
“In my opinion, the plaintiffs were right on one issue – the potential for government pressure to implicate First Amendment rights warrants careful consideration from the courts,” Gautman Hans, the leader of the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic, said. “But this case was obviously the wrong one for the Court to assess those free speech questions.”
This ruling comes as no surprise as the Democrat party and Biden administration pursue any means necessary to keep themselves in power.
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