A pending case gives the U.S. Supreme Court the opportunity to decide whether the purported need to protect public health can trump the First Amendment.
The Court granted certiorari to hear an appeal of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision in Murthy v. Missouri, which prohibited federal health and other officials from communicating with social media platforms about removing posts that the government identifies as false or misleading.
The appellate court found evidence of "a coordinated campaign" of unprecedented "Magnitude orchestrated by federal officials" to suppress disfavored, generally conservative, points of view on social media.
The alleged censorship reviewed by the court covered several topics but mostly related to supposed Covid-19 "Misinformation"-including opposition to Covid masking and lockdowns, the lab-leak theory of Covid's origin, and questioning the need for universal Covid vaccination.
In court, the two scientists provided convincing evidence that Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health conspired to organize, as Collins advocated in an email to Fauci, "a quick and devastating published take down" of the GBD and its authors, and that other NIH personnel directly contacted social media companies, resulting in the censorship of the GBD and its authors.
The Supreme Court will hear the case early this year, though the justices are unlikely to issue a decision before the spring.
Meantime, the Court has stayed the lower court's injunction prohibiting federal officials from "Coerc[ing]" social media companies to engage in censorship or "Meaningfully" controlling companies' content-moderation decisions.
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