In a 6-3 decision, the justices threw out a lawsuit from state attorneys in Louisiana and Missouri, and said they had no standing to bring such claims.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented.
The ruling throws out a broad court order issued last year by a federal judge in Louisiana and upheld by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that threatened hundreds of Biden administration officials with a contempt citation if they “significantly encouraged” a platform to remove some content.
Social media sites did not sue or complain their rights were violated.
Instead, Republican state attorneys in Missouri and Louisiana sued alleging the right to free speech in this country was being violated by the Biden administration’s “sprawling federal censorship enterprise.” They pointed to actions by the White House as well as the FBI, the Office of the Surgeon General and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In October, in response to an appeal from Solicitor Gen. Elizabeth Prelogar, the justices had put the Louisiana judge’s order on hold over dissents by Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch. “Government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government,” Alito wrote at the time.
But the justices agreed to hear arguments and rule on the 1st Amendment issue raised in the case of Murthy vs. Missouri.
This term, the court has heard three major cases on social media and the 1st Amendment, all of them driven by complaints from conservatives that their speech is being censored.
The other two cases arose when Florida and Texas adopted laws that would impose fines or money damages on major social media platforms if they removed postings or content from conservatives.
The case decided Wednesday began with a complaint that the social media platforms had blocked or downgraded posts on topics such as “the COVID–19 lab leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The state attorneys took their complaint to U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee in Monroe, La. He handed down an unusually far-reaching order that prohibited federal officials and agencies from “urging or encouraging” the removal of “protected speech” from social media. He described the administration’s conduct as “arguably … the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
The administration appealed to the 5th Circuit Court in New Orleans, but lost. A three-judge panel said the administration “officials have engaged in a broad pressure campaign designed to coerce social-media companies into suppressing speakers, viewpoints, and content disfavored by the government. The harms that radiate from such conduct extend far …. It impacts every social-media user.”