The Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with the Biden administration in a case accusing social media sites of wrongly censoring posts about the COVID-19 pandemic.
But instead of basing the ruling on the First Amendment’s free speech protections, the majority opinion focused on legal standing, which is whether people who want to challenge a policy in court actually have any suffer damage as a result.
The justices in the 6-3 majority, including the Court’s three liberals, said the challengers in the social media case — the states of Missouri and Louisiana, and five individual social media users — lack standing because they have not shown that they suffer concrete damage as a result of the alleged government interference in the content moderation policies of the social media sites.
“Plaintiffs rely on past allegations of government censorship as evidence that future censorship is likely. But they generally fail to connect their past social media limitations to (federal officials’) communications with the platforms. Thus, past events do little to assist plaintiffs in obtaining an injunction to prevent future harm,” Judge Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion.
It is the second notable ruling by the court in as many weeks in which legal standing is invoked.
The first came in the case of the abortion pill, and it was unanimous. The justices agreed that a group of doctors with moral concerns about abortion, who do not actually prescribe the pill or treat patients taking the pill, should not have been able to challenge the FDA’s guidelines for the use of mifepristone Pull.
“Under Article III of the Constitution, a plaintiff’s desire to make a drug less available to others does not confer a right to sue,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
This story will be updated.
