The Supreme Court issued a ruling Wednesday siding with the Biden administration in a landmark case that challenged the federal government’s ability to pressure social media companies to censor speech.
The justices ruled 6-3 to reverse a lower court injunction barring the federal government from “coercing or significantly encouraging” social media companies to suppress speech, finding that plaintiffs did not have standing. The case, Murthy v. Missouri, was brought by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, along with five individual plaintiffs whose own speech was censored.
“The plaintiffs rely on allegations of past Government censorship as evidence that future censorship is likely,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion. “But they fail, by and large, to link their past social-media restrictions to the defendants’ communications…
