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

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.

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. 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 that included Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. “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.