Murthy v. Missouri

Since around 2020, then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt had been filing numerous lawsuits against the Biden administration, with a total of 26 suits as of October 2022. According to Schmitt's senate campaign website, these suits were filed to hold the Biden administration accountable, while Schmitt later said "The Attorney General's Office standing in between Missourians and a radical, overreaching government is a hallmark of federalism, and states have a vital duty to keep the federal government in check." Targets of Schmitt's lawsuits included the administration's policies on oil and gas production, Biden's planned debt forgiveness of student loans, and mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter and significantly altered the way it operated. He also selected specific independent journalists to release the "Twitter Files", a series of internal communications that Musk and the journalists assert show that parts of the U.S. government were working with Twitter to suppress free speech related to election fraud and misinformation about the pandemic. While legal analysts, speaking with The New York Times, believed that the steps Twitter took to moderate content after contact by the U.S. government were not censorship, many Republicans believed the Twitter Files proved their views were being censored. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives held a set of hearings in March 2023 about the Biden administration "weaponizing" social media for its own purposes. Schmitt (now a U.S. senator) and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (now the governor of Louisiana) were among those who testified before the committee with information from their case's discovery process, bringing their ongoing lawsuit greater public attention. ==Filing and depositions==

The lawsuit alleges that President Joe Biden and his administration were "working with social media giants such as Meta, Twitter, and YouTube to censor and suppress free speech, including truthful information, related to COVID-19, election integrity, and other topics, under the guise of combating 'misinformation'." The lawsuit was co-filed with Louisiana's Attorney General Jeff Landry in May 2022 in the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana. Additional plaintiffs were added several months later, including Jim Hoft, owner of The Gateway Pundit, a conservative publication, and Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, academics who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which questioned the government's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The plaintiffs obtained subpoenas in October and November 2022 from former and current members of the Biden administration, including Anthony Fauci, who served as Chief Medical Advisor to the President, and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. The government attempted to block these deposition requests, but only a few such requests were granted. Fauci attended a deposition in November 2022 and said he favored spreading accurate information, which Schmitt claimed proved that social media censored content. == Preliminary injunction ==

Hearings for the case were held in May 2023. Judge Doughty issued his ruling on July 4, 2023, issuing a preliminary injunction against several Biden administration officials from contacting social media services for "the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech." In his 155-page ruling, Doughty wrote: "The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country." He continued: "If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history. The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition." The U.S. Department of Justice filed its intent to appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit the next day. The Department of Justice sought a stay of Doughty's injunction, saying that it would prevent them from "working with social media companies on initiatives to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes" ahead of the 2024 elections. Legal experts, speaking to Reuters, said that while the case has merit, Doughty's preliminary injunction will face tough legal challenges on appeal. On July 14, 2023, the Fifth Circuit granted a temporary administrative stay of the injunction until further order. Appellate decision On September 8, 2023, the Fifth Circuit ruling upheld the district court ruling against the Biden administration but removed nine of Doughty's injunction's 10 provisions. The court found that some of the communications between the federal government and the social media companies to try to fight alleged COVID-19 misinformation "coerced or significantly encouraged social media platforms to moderate content", which violated the First Amendment. But the court also ruled that Doughty's preliminary injunction was too broad, as it blocked some legal social media content created by government and unlawfully restrained the First Amendment speech rights of the private academic institutions that were not government actors. It narrowed the injunction to prevent the government from taking "actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling the social-media companies' decision-making processes." The court placed enforcement of the injunction on hold for ten days to allow any appeals to be filed. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito granted a temporary stay of the order on September 14, 2023, lasting initially until September 23 and then extended to September 27, to give both parties the ability to argue further on the appeal. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals expanded the injunction issued in September to include the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), ruling that it used frequent interactions with social media platforms "to push them to adopt more restrictive policies on election-related speech". ==Supreme Court==

In October 2023, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Murthy v. Missouri. The Court also lifted the injunctions set by the lower courts, allowing the federal government to continue to contact social media companies without restrictions while the case continued. Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the lifting of the injunctions, with Alito writing, "Government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government, and therefore today's decision is highly disturbing." The Court heard oral argument on March 18, 2024. The Supreme Court issued its decision on June 26, 2024. The 6–3 majority determined that neither the states nor other respondents had standing under Article III, reversing the Fifth Circuit decision. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion, stating: "To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek. Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction." Barrett cited a "dearth of facts" to support the claim that any action taken by the social media companies was a result of executive branch action for each of the plaintiffs, writing that in some cases there was no evidence that any government defendant had mentioned them at all. Barrett also wrote that the Fifth Circuit's decision relied on a "clearly erroneous" reading of the evidentiary record by the District Court. She listed numerous examples in which Doughty had misframed routine communications as supposed "censorship requests". Other legal analysts noted the remarkable number of factual errors and fabricated quotations that had passed through the district court and Fifth Circuit and made it to the Supreme Court, some of which were raised and clarified in oral argument. Dissent Justice Alito wrote the dissent, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. He wrote that this was "one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years", that the respondents had brought enough evidence to suggest the government's actions were unconstitutional, but that the Court "shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think. That is regrettable." ==Aftermath==

The decision attracted both support and criticism. Some commentators praised the Court's decision to reverse the Fifth Circuit, claiming the case was a politically motivated effort by conservative activists. Others agreed with the Court's opinion but were disappointed that the Court did not use the opportunity to articulate a clear standard for government coercion and free expression. Many libertarian and conservative commentators called the ruling a threat to Americans' speech rights. On January 20, 2025, the first day of his second term as president, Donald Trump signed the Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship executive order. A response to actions the government allegedly took under Biden that were central to the case, the order would prevent the federal government from interfering with any protected free speech unless the administration approved. In March 2026, the Trump administration and the states reached a settlement that would block the U.S. Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) from threatening or coercing platforms with regulatory action to influence content moderation decisions for ten years. ==See also==