In a decision that was perhaps not surprising but was still pretty shocking, the Supreme Court determined that it was totally fine for the Biden administration to collude with social media companies to suppress, censor, and silence Americans' free speech during the recent pandemic. It wasn't. As editor for The Post Millennial during that time, watching as accounts were permanently banned, demonetized, deboosted, as accounts were locked until "misinformation" or "disinformation" was deleted, watching the representatives of the White House consistently lie for their own political gain and to further a narrative they had concocted, it is not alright that the court has said basically "yeah, we're cool with that."
The 6-3 ruling, headed up by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, said that the states that brought the suit, namely Missouri who sued Biden's Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, did not have standing to bring the case. She also bought into the government's reasoning for engaging in censorship through the use of third party apps like Facebook and Twitter, saying that the federal officials were "concerned about the spread of 'misinformation' on social media" and that they "communicated extensively with the platforms about their content-moderation efforts." Barrett and her liberal colleagues claim that the states were unable to "demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek." In other words, it wasn't the government that was doing the censoring, it was the social media platforms, so the states can't say they were harmed by the government. And for sure, the social media platforms, as Barrett noted in the opinion, did "enforce their politics against users who post false or misleading content about the pandemic."
But they also got a lot of help to determine just what that "false or misleading content" was, and they got it from the government. They got messages on "misinformation" not only about Covid, vaccines, mandates, lockdowns, but about the 2020 election, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden's influence peddling son, and so much more. All of this was revealed when Elon Musk took over Twitter and gave access to the communication records to a few investigative journalists who published the Twitter Files, showing in-depth collusion between deep state actors across federal agencies and social media platform execs. It was only after this major reveal that Missouri sought to bring the suit, which many other states joined in an effort to protect the free speech rights of their citizens from a vast government overreach that was, yes, explicitly intended to silence Americans and their 1A protected dissent.
At The Post Millennial, a little start-up outlet that was only cutting its teeth as Covid hit—I'd only gotten a full time job at the outlet on March 1, 2020, 13 days before lockdown in NYC—we watched the censorship sweep across the internet. On Facebook, there were rampant fact-checks from shady fact-checking groups that claimed to have authority over all of us. One black mark from the likes of fact-checking non-profits that peppered their names with "science," or "health," or "integrity" or some such nonsense and our posts would be demonetized and deboosted. They demanded we remove content on the Covid lab-leak theory, or the ineffectiveness of vaccines or masking, came after us when we shared articles about parents being fed up and bringing their anger over mandates, masking, lock-downs, and eventually pornographic school books, sex ed, and other absurdities.
Now, the court is telling us that the states in which we live don't have standing to fight on behalf of their constituents who were robbed of their ability to speak freely in the town square. And of course, much of what was suppressed, silenced, censored, called misinformation or disinformation, turned out to be, well, accurate. Masking was ineffective in schools, schools and churches should not have been closed, the Covid vaccine did not turn out to be a great drug for everyone, there's a good chance the virus was lab-born, climate change, the election, and of course Hunter Biden's laptop was real.
The Court admits that all of this suppression happened. Then they say that "[t]hough the platform restricted the plaintiffs' content, the plaintiffs maintain that the Federal Government was behind it. Acting on that belief, the plaintiffs sued dozens of Executive Branch officials and agencies, alleging that they pressured the platforms to censor the plaintiffs' speech in violation of the First Amendment." The Court could not find that this claim was valid and majorly copped out on taking a stand:
"We begin—and end—with standing. At this stage, neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established standing to seek an injunction against any defendant. We therefore lack jurisdiction to reach the merits of the dispute."
It is only in the dissent, from Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch, that Americans get a conciliation for the rampant censorship that was practiced against them at the hands of the federal government, and even then, it is small relief indeed.
"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. Officials who read today's decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message the Court should send."
Of course, Alito is right. The dissent correctly adds: "Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government... and speech that advances humanity's store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts."
The Supreme Court has roundly failed in its duty to uphold the First Amendment. For small-but-growing publications like The Post Millennial, which sought to report what was in the public interest as declared by the public we serve, this is nothing short of a travesty of justice. We all know what happened, and absolutely no one who loves freedom, or this country, should be okay with it.
