There’s no doubt about it, the Supreme Court’s latest rulings on Big Tech censorship were an enormous setback for the cause of free speech online. But if we squint hard enough, we can certainly find a silver lining.
First, the downside. In a separate set of rulings this week, the Supreme Court scuttled two attempts to protect citizens’ free speech on giant social media websites. In the first, Murthy v. Missouri, the court set a frustratingly higher bar for two states and several banished social media users to sue the White House and executive branch agencies for their deliberate collusion with Silicon Valley monopolies to stifle online expression.
Four days later, in the two NetChoice cases, the court gave no final judgment on the merits but vacated both conflicting lower court decisions regarding the state laws of Florida and Texas prohibiting Big Tech from discriminatorily censoring user content, sending the cases back for a better factual record and a corrected legal standard.
In Murthy, the majority avoided the merits of the free speech issue, choosing instead to remand the case because the censored plaintiffs lacked “standing.” The test the court imposed for standing is a gymnastic one, almost Olympian. It requires that the victims of the Biden administration’s censorship scheme must show that the timeline when the posts were suppressed matches up not only with the timing of the Biden agency’s covert demands of the Silicon Valley companies and not before but also that the subject matter censored must exactly match up with the subject matter of the demands by the White House and its agencies. […]
– Read More: thefederalist.com
