The Supreme Court’s refusal on standing grounds to reach the merits in Murthy v. Missouri has made clear that the remedy for executive branch suppression of speech through private companies will not come from the courts. This means that if you believe as we do that government has no business dictating what information should be censored in the modern-day public square — social media websites — the remedy lies with Congress.
The very idea of the government silencing American voices online reeks of authoritarianism and undermines the principles of self-government. Social media companies are not extensions of the state. They are private entities with their own terms of service and community guidelines. Any attempt by the government to coerce them into censoring certain information sets a dangerous precedent that threatens the fabric of our society.
Murthy is a perfect example of this alarming trend. Surgeon General Murthy’s attempt to force the removal of specific posts related to Covid-19 treatments from social media websites was nothing short of censorship. And we now know for a fact that much of the Covid-related information that the government disapproved of and demanded that social media companies censor — for example, the lab-leak hypothesis, the inefficacy of masks, the lack of any scientific basis for the six-foot rule — was either true or, at a minimum, fairly debatable.
Sadly, this is far from the only example of government coordination with companies to censor certain information or voices. The campaign to censor discussion of the Hunter
