WASHINGTON, DC – Federal officials and the Biden White House can resume censoring conservatives on social media for now, as a divided Supreme Court on Monday stayed a lower court injunction that had blocked such censorship on First Amendment grounds – a decision Justice Samuel Alito called “highly disturbing.”
“This case concerns what two lower courts found to be a coordinated campaign by high-level federal officials to suppress the expression of disfavored views on important public issues,” Alito wrote in a dissent from the court’s ruling, noting that the injunction the justices now blocked had stopped Biden administration officials from “either coercing social media companies to engage in such censorship or actively controlling those companies’ decisions about the content posted on their platforms.”
Then-Missouri Attorney General (now-Senator) Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General (now-Governor-elect) Jeff Landry filed suit. Several private citizens joined, including Covid medical experts whose views on Covid-19 were suppressed on social media, alleging that the Biden administration was censoring views – including scientific analysis of data – that differed from Joe Biden’s and senior officials’ like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.
A federal judge in Louisiana sided with Schmitt and Landry, granting an injunction against White House and Biden administration officials. The court held, “It is the purpose of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of the market, whether it be by government itself or private licensee.”
