The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear a second major social media case and will decide whether the Biden White House violated the First Amendment when pressed

major

platforms

can we say which one?

to remove “misinformation and disinformation” about COVID-19.

Three conservatives disagreed, saying the court should have upheld an injunction banning government officials from contacting social media sites.

“Government censorship of private speech is inconsistent with our democratic form of government,” said Justice Samuel A. Alito.

jr.

joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch, wrote:

We call the court’s decision to rule on this issue ‘very disturbing’. If you are trying to say that these two views are incompatible, that is, both cannot be true, we need to say that more explicitly. But if you don’t want to say that and leave it up to the reader to imply, that’s fine.

The judges

now have two opposing views on how the First Amendment right to free speech applies to social media, both of which were endorsed by conservative judges on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

The first view holds that a state (in this case, Texas) does not violate the First Amendment if it imposes heavy fines on private social media sites for allegedly discriminating against conservative viewpoints.

The second view is that federal officials violated the First Amendment by “substantially encouraging” social media sites to remove misinformation.

The common element in both cases is that Republican officials in Texas, Louisiana and Missouri, as well as the judges of the 5th Circuit, believe that conservative views are being unfairly suppressed on social media.

Last month, the justices agreed to hear a free speech ruling against a Texas law that authorized the state to regulate popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and You.

Tube. NetChoice, a coalition of technology groups, claimed the law violated the social media sites’ free speech rights, but the 5th Circuit upheld the law on the theory that the state was trying to combat “censorship.” The Supreme Court had blocked the law from taking effect by a 5-4 vote.

The new case arose not from complaints from social media sites, but from a lawsuit filed by Republican prosecutors

general, right? Yes

from Missouri and Louisiana. They said federal officials, including the

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surgeon

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Eneral and the FBI had conspired to “censor unfavorable speech” by “significantly encouraging social media platforms” to remove some posts.

They took their complaint to U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee in Monroe, La., who issued an unusually sweeping order on the

Fourth 4th

of July that banned dozens of federal officials and agencies from “enforcing or encouraging” the removal of “protected speech” from social media. He described the administration’s behavior as perhaps the most massive attack on freedom of speech in the history of the United States.

The Biden administration appealed to the 5th Circuit, but in early September another three-judge panel upheld most of the judge’s ruling.

They said government “officials have waged a broad pressure campaign designed to force social media companies to suppress speakers, views and content that do not appeal to the government. The harm resulting from such behavior is far-reaching…. media user.”

The order says the White House and “their employees and agents will take no action, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage any social media company to remove, remove, suppress or diminish any social media company, nor by changing their algorithms. , posted content on social media that contained protected freedom of expression.”

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, who represented the government, filed an emergency appeal asking the Supreme Court to block the judge’s order and rule on the constitutional dispute.

She said the case involves “an unprecedented order appointing the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana to oversee executive branch communications with and about social media platforms, including speeches by senior White House officials that include some of the most salient public issues of the issue are discussed. day.”

She said Louisiana district and appellate judges “have not identified any threat, implicit or explicit, of adverse consequences” if a social media site refused to remove certain content. Still, they have “implemented a sweeping preliminary injunction against the speech of thousands of federal officials and employees over the content posted by anyone on any social media platform,” she said.

She argued that the states had no right to sue, and that White House officials were free to speak out against the spread of falsehoods about COVID vaccines or the 2020 election. “It stands “It is undisputed that the content moderation decisions at issue in this case were made by private social media companies, such as Facebook and YouTube,” she said in Murthy vs. Missouri.

The Republican attorneys general’s complaints were not limited to COVID-19. They informed the court of this in their response to the appeal

That

“The FBI orchestrated a deceptive campaign to induce platforms to censor the October 14, 2020 New York Posts story about Hunter Biden’s laptop just before the 2020 election.” Early 2021, when

President

Biden moved into the White House, “federal censorship activities dramatically escalated,” they added.

Jeff Landry, the Louisiana attorney general who filed the original suit, won election as the state’s governor last week.