Justice Samuel Alito excoriated the Supreme Court majority for “shirk[ing]” its duty to restrain the government’s coercive censorship efforts in “one of the most important free speech cases” to reach the high court in years.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday sided 6-3 with the Biden administration in Murthy v. Missouri, finding that two states and five individual plaintiffs lacked standing to seek an injunction against the government’s wide-ranging efforts to suppress speech online. The case concerned the federal government requesting social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter remove certain content related to COVID-19 and other hot-button issues; many of the posts that were censored were factual, and critics argued the Biden administration attempted to censor conservative viewpoints
In his dissent, Alito, who was joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, argued that the majority’s decision “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.”