U.S. Supreme Court will soon hear oral arguments in a case that concerns what two lower courts found to be a “coordinated campaign” by top Biden administration officials to suppress disfavored views on key public issues like COVID-19 vaccine side effects and pandemic lockdowns.
The Supreme Court has scheduled a hearing on March 18 in a case known as Murthy v. Missouri, which started when the attorneys general of two states, Missouri and Louisiana, filed suit alleging that social media companies like Facebook were blocking access to their platforms or suppressing posts on controversial subjects.
The initial lawsuit, later modified by an appeals court, accused Biden administration officials of engaging in what amounts to government-led censorship-by-proxy by pressuring social media companies to take down posts or suspend accounts.
Some of the topics that were targeted for downgrade and other censorious actions included voter fraud in the 2020 election, the COVID-19 lab leak theory, vaccine side effects, the social harm of pandemic lockdowns, and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The plaintiffs argued that high-level federal government officials were the ones pulling the strings of social media censorship by coercing, threatening, and pressuring social media companies to suppress Americans’ free speech.
‘Unrelenting Pressure’
In a landmark ruling, a judge at the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana granted a temporary injunction blocking various Biden administration officials and government agencies such as the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI from collaborating with big tech firms to censor posts on social media.
Later, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed with the district court’s ruling, saying it was “correct in its assessment—‘unrelenting pressure’ from certain government officials likely ‘had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens,’” the judges wrote. ”We see no error or abuse of discretion in that finding.”
