Supreme Court justices mocked the common concept of self-censorship Wednesday in the majority opinion for Murthy v. Missouri, wherein the nine-judge panel ruled the plaintiffs lacked standing.
In the 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court punted on the constitutional question of government-pressured censorship of private internet companies. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion that “to obtain forward-looking relief” case plaintiffs “must establish a substantial risk of future injury that is traceable to the Government defendants and likely to be redressed by an injunction against them.” The justice, however, added the plaintiffs’ arguments for standing were unpersuasive.
“First, they argue they suffer ‘continuing, present adverse effects’ from their past restrictions, as they must now self-censor on social media,” Barrett wrote. “But the plaintiffs ‘cannot manufacture standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is not certainly impending.”
“As we explained,” Barrett continued, “the plaintiffs have not shown that they are likely to face a risk of future censorship traceable to the defendants.”
Barrett argued plaintiffs were already incentivized to self-censor by the major companies’ pre-existing content moderation policies, “so it is ‘difficult to see how’ the plaintiffs’ self-censorship ‘can be traced to’ the defendants.”
In other words, Justice Barrett’s ruling is based in part on skepticism of the prevalence of self-censorship to begin with, let alone censorship provoked by government campaigns to suppress dissident speech. What the plaintiffs made clear throughout the case, however, is that social media websites took the
