On Friday, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito extended a restraining order that prevented President Joe Biden’s administration from pressuring social media sites to take down content it considered to be false information regarding COVID-19 and other issues of public interest.
The court now has more time to consider the administration’s request to overturn an injunction issued by a lower court that found that federal officials had probably violated the First Amendment’s protections for free speech by pressuring social media platforms to censor some posts. The case was postponed until Wednesday in order to give the court more time to think about this request.
The conflict is placed on hold by Alito’s order until September 27 at 11:59 p.m. ET. He had already suspended the decision of the lower court until September 22. The justice assigned by the court to handle specific cases involving a group of states, including Louisiana, the place where the action was initially brought, is Alito.
In a lawsuit against federal officials, the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, as well as a number of social media users, claimed that they had illegally assisted in stifling conservative-leaning speech that was protected by the First Amendment on significant social media sites.
These sites included Facebook from Meta, YouTube from Alphabet, and X, formerly known as Twitter. Officials from the federal government claimed that many of the posts contained inaccurate information regarding the pandemic.
By notifying social media sites of content that contravened their own regulations, the Biden administration claimed that its members had done nothing wrong and were attempting to lessen the risks associated with internet misinformation.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, who is based in Louisiana, concluded in July that government agents had coercively pressured the companies to remove user posts that opposed the COVID-19 vaccine, pandemic-related lockdowns meant to protect the public, or the outcome of the 2020 election in which the Democrat Joe Biden defeated the Republican Donald Trump.
With the exception of a clause addressing coercion, which they narrowed, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans dismissed the majority of the injunction that Doughty imposed limiting the administration’s social media comments.
The narrower injunction covered the White House, the surgeon general, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FBI, and said that they could not “coerce or significantly encourage” the corporations to remove content.
The White House argued to the Supreme Court that the balance of the injunction still went too far and would interfere with how the FBI, the Department of Health, and other government entities handle issues of public interest and security.