The federal government and its allies have lost all credibility in determining what constitutes foreign election interference after using their “findings” to trample on free speech. But thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Murthy v. Missouri on Wednesday, the federal government can resume shutting down Americans’ speech under the guise of preventing “foreign disinformation.”
Missouri and Louisiana argued the Biden administration’s collusion with Big Tech companies to silence disfavored speech violated the First Amendment. Among other things, the Biden administration asked Big Tech to censor posts that went against the government’s narrative about Covid-19.
The high court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs lacked standing.
As CNN explained, “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.”
The opinion itself, authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, uncritically referred to Facebook’s “measures to counter foreign interference campaigns” and the FBI’s communications to Big Tech firms warning of “pernicious foreign influence campaigns that might spread on their sites.” Even though those warnings actually served to censor an American newspaper’s accurate reporting about then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s influence-peddling, the court concluded that such censorship may continue.
It wasn’t just the bombshell story sourced to Hunter Biden’s laptop that the censors “got wrong.” Recent memory offers several examples of media, government, and tech gatekeepers weaponizing false claims of “foreign interference” to
