Supreme Court backs Biden administration’s push to restrict misinformation on social media

In a win for the Biden administration, the Supreme Court ruled that the government can ask social media companies to remove harmful misinformation on their platforms.

In a 6-3 decision, justices threw out a lower court ruling that limited the government’s ablity to communicate with social media companies, saying that decision was incorrect because the challengers — two states and five social media users — failed to show they were the proper groups to bring the lawsuit.

The case stems from the Biden administration’s attempt to reduce misinformation about Covid-19 during the pandemic through requests to social media companies to take down false statements about vaccines or the virus. Missouri and Louisiana filed lawsuits alleging the government “coerced” the companies into removing the posts — and violated First Amendement rights.

But the Supreme Court said that those requests did not amount to coercion because the states and users suing did not show they suffered any harm.

“The plaintiffs fail, by and large, to link their past social media restrictions and the defendants’ communications with the platforms,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority opinion.

In perhaps one of the most buzzwordy cases of the term, the states targeted the Biden administration, on behalf of two Covid-skeptical infectious disease epidemiologists, an anti-mask advocate, the owner of the conspiracy theory website The Gateway Pundit and a psychiatrist who opposed lockdown mandates, for what they believed was an orchestrated public and private pressure campaign to suppress conservative viewpoints, speakers and content online.

They alleged the Biden administration “coerced” social media companies into removing public health misinformation