The United States Supreme Court has ruled in a six-to-three decision that the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri lack standing to sue the Biden government over the latter’s pressuring Big Tech companies to censor American citizens for speech they determined to be “misinformation.” Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett declared that the District Court and Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’s decisions issuing an injunction barring the Biden government from communicating with social media platforms is to be lifted.
Additionally, Barrett and the court‘s majority—comprised of Justices Roberts, Kavanaugh, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson—ruled that the case should be remanded back to the Fifth Circuit with the specific instructions that the plaintiffs lack standing under Article III of the Constitution. Meanwhile, a District Court and the Fifth Circuit had previously held that the lawsuit could proceed under Article III.
Murthy v. Missouri stems from a series of lawsuits by several U.S. states and a handful of social media users. The plaintiffs allege various agencies and officials in the Biden government violated Americans’ First Amendment free speech rights by pressuring social media platforms to remove content they deemed “to be false or misleading.”
The Supreme Court examined the Biden government’s communications with tech companies, specifically those involving the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election. Justice Barrett states, ” And while the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices, the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.”
From this determination, the court held that the plaintiffs could not demonstrate “their ‘direct censorship injuries'” and could not satisfy the requirements for Article III standing.
