Supreme Court allows White House to press social media companies to remove disinformation

CNN —

The Supreme Court on Wednesday said the White House and federal agencies such as the FBI may continue to urge social media platforms to take down content the government views as misinformation, handing the Biden administration a technical if important election-year victory.

Of immediate significance, the decision means that the Department of Homeland Security may continue to flag posts to social media companies such as Facebook and X that it believes may be the work of foreign agents seeking to disrupt this year’s presidential race.

In this October 2023 file photo, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor attends an event at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

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Rather than delving into the weighty First Amendment questions raised by the case, the court ruled that the state and social media users who challenged the Biden administration did not have standing to sue.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion for a 6-3 majority.

“To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek,” Barrett wrote. “Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”

Biden administration officials have for years tried to persuade social media platforms to take down posts featuring misinformation about vaccines, the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 election, among other things. Many of those posts, the government has said, ran afoul of the platforms’ own stated policies.

Republican officials in two states –