The 6-3 decision does not address the First Amendment issues at the center of the cases, our colleague Ella Lee reported.
It instead denies the challenge filed by two Republican attorneys general and five individuals by finding they didn’t have legal standing to bring it.
“The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the years-long communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different conduct,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority.
“This Court’s standing doctrine prevents us from ‘exercising such general legal oversight’ of other branches of Government,” Barrett continued.
She contended that social media platforms have targeted false and misleading speech “for years,” pointing to false election claims debunked as early as 2016 and public health falsities since 2018 — long before the 2020 presidential election or the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Republican attorneys general and private parties had alleged that the government “coordinated and colluded” with social media platforms to target conservative users and viewpoints.
Attempts to police controversial posts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election and COVID-19 — which the attorneys general called a “campaign of censorship” — were at the heart of the case.
However, when the plaintiffs faced speech restrictions, they frequently spanned platforms, topics and time frames, Barrett wrote. When those restrictions did line up, they also aligned with “independent incentives to moderate content,” she said.
In his dissenting opinion, conservative Justice Samuel Alito — joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — scolded his fellow justices for failing to decide the issue based on its First Amendment implications.
“The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think,” Alito wrote. “That is regrettable.”
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
