The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Missouri, Louisiana and five individuals who were either banned from social media during the pandemic or whose posts, they say, were not prominently featured.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday on the role of the First Amendment in the internet age.The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday on the role of the First Amendment in the internet age.In a major case testing the role of the First Amendment in the internet age, the U.S. Supreme Court on Mondayfocused on the federal government's ability to combat what it sees as false, misleading or dangerous information online.
The government notes that officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations have interacted regularly with social media companies. Indeed, from the beginning of the pandemic in the Trump administration, the companies themselves reached out to government health agencies for guidance on what was and was not reliable medical information.
But the plaintiffs in the case have produced dozens and dozens of quotes from government emails that they say prove the government's coercive behavior. Colin Stretch, former general counsel for Facebook, agrees that the idea of social media platforms bowing to government officials is outlandish. "There is no clear partisan line" in Monday's case, observes NYU law professor Ryan Goodman. And you don't have to be a genius to see that some politicians have a convenient way of switching sides, depending on the content of the speech at issue.
"It might be naive to expect the social media companies to be reliable proxies for the speech interests of their users," he said at NYU.
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