Justice Alito slams Biden for ‘inflammatory’ comments in Supreme Court’s Covid disinformation case

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito blasted the Supreme Court for rejecting claims that President Joe Biden unlawfully coerced social media companies to remove disinformation on their platforms.

Alito, whose dissent was joined by justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, argued that the Biden administration impeded on the “free marketplace of ideas” by preventing “dissenting views” on Covid-19, posing a “serious threat” to the First Amendment.

In her opinion in Murthy v Missiouri for the court’s majority on Wednesday, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said Republican-led states and social media users had failed to show they were harmed by any government actions. She noted that social media platforms had strengthened their content moderation policies independently before any government agencies were even involved.

But Alito — calling the case one of the “most important free speech cases” in years — appeared to suggest that the Biden administration had strong-armed platforms and accused the president himself of “inflammatory” speech.

“What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship” found in other cases, Alito wrote, “but it was no less coercive.”

“And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so,” he added.

“If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send.”

In remarks from the White House in 2021, President Biden suggested that social media companies were “killing people” for allowing conspiracy theories to run rampant on platforms in the middle of a public health crisis.

He later clarified