SCOTUS Annihilates Free Speech in Devastating Murthy v. Missouri Ruling 

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision Wednesday that the Murthy v. Missouri defendants victimized by the Biden Administration's expansive censorship efforts lack standing. The devastating ruling effectively greenlights the government’s unconstitutional and coercive efforts to violate the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to censor speech it dislikes. 

Murthy v. Missouri exposed the federal government and entities the government outsourced its censorship efforts to for silencing speech related to everything from the validity of Hunter Biden’s laptop, COVID-19 origins, the efficacy of face masks, and 2020 election integrity. 

In a fiery dissent signed on by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, Justice Samuel Alito described the federal government’s censorship efforts as “blatantly unconstitutional,” adding that “the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to" determine it as such. 

While the majority of the court claimed defendants lacked standing, Alito stated that the defendants were “indisputably injured.” Not only were the defendants harmed, but all Americans were victimized. Indeed, even people who were not directly censored were prevented from reading and seeing things the government disliked.

Alito made the important point that, unlike newspapers, social media companies “have a powerful incentive to please important federal officials.” This is partly because social media companies rely heavily on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which secures their right as public platforms not to be held civilly liable for content spread on their sites. If the companies were to defy the Biden Administration, the government may begin a crusade to revoke social media companies' Section 230 privileges. 

Alito also notes that social media companies are vulnerable to anti-trust actions. According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a potential antitrust lawsuit poses an “existential” threat to his company. Moreover, social media companies’ “overseas operations may be subjected to tough regulation in the European Union and other foreign jurisdictions,” so they heavily “rely on the Federal Government’s diplomatic efforts to protect their interests,” wrote Alito. For all these reasons, when government officials submit censorship requests to social media companies, those requests are coercive and threatening. 

The ramifications of this ruling are dramatic. In throwing out the free speech lawsuit, "The Court,” wrote Alito, “permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think."

Crucially, the integrity of the 2024 election is now in grave danger. As Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson warned, the Biden Administration “is going all out right now to deputize pliant social media companies to do its censorship work ahead of the election. They're going to make 2020 look like child's play.”
 

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