On Monday, the censorship-industrial complex was put on trial when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the landmark free speech case Murthy v. Missouri.
Evidence in the case revealed that in the run-up to the 2020 election, and increasingly thereafter, a raft of federal agencies both directly and via cutouts cajoled, coerced, and colluded with social media companies to censor wrongthinking Americans at a magnitude of millions of posts on matters ranging from the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story to the integrity of mass mail-in balloting and the efficacy of Covid vaccines.
The Louisiana district court that originally heard the case found, and a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals panel affirmed, that these efforts — emanating from entities such as the Biden White House, FBI, and CDC to control the digital public square, interfering in our elections and skewing public policy debates — likely constituted a massive assault on the First Amendment.
The feds, the courts suggested, had effectively turned the likes of Facebook and X/Twitter into its deputized speech police, becoming state actors whose “content moderation” decisions violated constitutional restrictions on abridging speech.
The district court issued a preliminary injunction, that the appeals court narrowed and modified but upheld, to freeze the speech policing during the pendency of the case. It prohibited the Biden White House and implicated agencies from taking any actions: “formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their
