Free Speech
Thomas W. Hazlett | 6.26.2024 9:55 AM
UPDATE: The Court has issued a 6–3 decision in Murthy v. Missouri, holding that the plaintiffs lack standing.
A case pending at the U.S. Supreme Court stems from the efforts a multitude of federal agencies made to remove certain viewpoints from public view. In other words, they sought to abridge freedom of speech—you know, that thing that the First Amendment explicitly bans.
The case, Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden), may support or overturn the 5th Circuit's ruling that the government violated the First Amendment to reduce the circulation of viewpoints that various agencies believed noxious. This included, the court noted in its decision, controversies surrounding the "COVID-19 lab-leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side-effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story."
In many cases, the speech that offended the government has proven demonstrably true—the high social cost of school closings, for example, or the provenance of Hunter Biden's laptop. But the central problem is that the government sought, and often succeeded, in blocking free expression. Rather than engage in free and open debate, the government sought to squash it.
Speakers who were targeted for silencing—such as Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of medicine and economics—sued the government. The primary evidence came from caches of correspondence revealing government administrators cajoling, berating, swearing at, and arguably threatening (with policy sanctions) executives at Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Spotify.
A Louisiana judge issued extensive injunctions that barred a variety of officials and agencies from "meeting with social-media companies for the purpose of…pressuring or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech." This was largely upheld on appeal, and the Supreme Court accepted a review, with a hearing held this past March.
During oral arguments, the government suggested that these officials merely "sought to mitigate the hazards of online misinformation" by "calling attention to content" that violated the "platforms' policies." A pro-government amicus brief by........