The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments Monday morning in a potentially landmark case related to federal efforts to encourage social media companies to remove misinformation from their platforms.
The lawsuit was filed in 2022 by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. It alleges that the federal government colluded with social media companies such as Twitter (now called X) and Facebook to suppress free speech.
The attorney general alleges that the government specifically targeted conservative speech across a wide range of topics, from the effectiveness of vaccines to the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.
Oral arguments will begin Monday at 9 a.m. CST, but the order in which the cases will be heard has not yet been announced. Audio of the discussion can be live streamed at https://www.supremecourt.gov/.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who took over the case from his predecessor, called the federal government's actions “the greatest First Amendment violation in our nation's history.”
“We are fighting to build a wall of separation between technology and the state to protect our First Amendment rights to free, fair, and open debate,” Bailey said in an emailed statement. Ta.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement Thursday that the case uncovered 20,000 pages of documents revealing a “massive censorship operation” on the part of President Joe Biden.
“George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning against tyranny,” Murrill said. “He never intended for this book to be used as a how-to guide by the federal government.”
U.S. Attorney General Elizabeth Prelauger, who is defending the Biden administration in the case, said in a motion asking the Supreme Court to take the case that the government has the right to express its views and persuade other countries to take action. He said there is.
“A central aspect of presidential power is the use of the president's bullish pulpit to try to persuade the American people, and American businesses, to act in ways that he believes will advance the public interest. ” she wrote.
Prelogar wrote that social media companies are private entities and make independent decisions about what to remove.
Monday's case will be argued by Louisiana Attorney General Benjamin Aguignaga. Considered a rising star in the conservative legal world, Mr. Aguignaga served as law clerk to Judge Edith Jones of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, appointed by conservative President Ronald Reagan, and then-Texas Supreme Court Judge Don Willett. Served.
Mr. Aguignaga was a member of Sen. Ted Cruz's Senate Judiciary Committee staff and chief of staff in the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division during the Trump administration.
Most notably, Mr. Aguignaga clerked for Justice Samuel Alito during the 2018-2019 term on the Supreme Court.
“Very important incident”
President Donald Trump's 2022 court nominee, U.S. District Judge Terry Doty, could fuel vaccine hesitancy during the coronavirus pandemic and potentially overturn the election. The court ruled that officials from the Biden and Trump administrations forced social media companies to censor content.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans has barred the White House, Surgeon General, FBI and Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from having substantial contact with social media companies. The results found that the Biden administration likely violated the First Amendment by requiring major social media platforms to remove misleading or false content.
The Supreme Court in October suspended the order pending a decision in the case.
Three conservative justices, Justices Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch, dissented from the decision to block the injunction, with Alito calling the court's action “deeply disturbing” and criticizing unpopular online political commentary. He argued that there was a risk of suppressing the discussion of views.
Alex Abdo, litigation director at Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute, said the case is “a pivotal case that will determine the government's ability to pressure social media platforms to suppress speech.” .
“Governments do not have the power to threaten platforms to censor protected speech, but in order for governments to govern effectively and make their views known to the public, they need the ability to engage in public debate,” Abdo said. We have to have that,” he said.
David Green, director of human rights at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the injunction issued by the lower court was too broad.
“Government co-optation of content moderation systems is a serious threat to free speech,” Green said. “However, it is permissible and appropriate for government agencies and officials to inform, communicate with, persuade, or even criticize a site, without coercion, about user statements that the site publishes. , and there are clearly cases where it is even good public policy.”
Gowri Ramachandran, associate director of elections and government programs at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said the federal government needs to be able to share information with social media companies to ensure election integrity. Ta.
Ramachandran said accurate information about elections is critical to American democracy, and the spread of false information through social media threatens elections and election officials.
“There were already situations during the 2016 election where there was an attempt at foreign interference,” she said. “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg then said he wanted to know if foreign agents were sending propaganda on his platform.” 'And then the government started doing things like that, but I don't see it as anything close to government censorship. ”
Links to misinformation and conspiracy theories
As the case wandered through the courts, it was joined by several co-plaintiffs with long histories of debunking misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Among them is Gateway Pundit, a right-wing conspiracy website that has made a career out of spreading conspiracies on a wide range of topics, from the 2018 Parkland school shooting to former President Barack Obama's birth certificate. Including founder Jim Hoft.
More recently, Hoft has become one of the biggest purveyors of the election fraud lie. He is currently facing a defamation lawsuit in St. Louis Circuit Court brought by two Georgia election officials who received death threats after false reporting about voting fraud by Gateway Poundit.
In appellate court arguments in August, the attorney general specifically named Hoft, arguing that he is “currently the subject of an ongoing campaign by federal authorities targeting content on the website.”
Jill Hines is named as another co-plaintiff in the lawsuit. She is co-director of Health Freedom Louisiana, an anti-vaccine group that promotes, among other things, a theory that has been completely denied by medical experts that vaccines cause autism.
Louisiana Illuminator Editor Greg LaRose contributed to this report.
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