SCOTUS Rules That US Government Can Continue Talking to Social Media Companies
wired.com
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SCOTUS didn't rule anything of the sort; they didn't get to the merits of the case. They dismissed the claim for lack of standing:
"We begin--and end--with standing. At this stage, neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established standing to seek an injunction against any defendant. We therefore lack jurisdiction to reach the merits of the dispute."
This detail is in the article.
This was a base act of legal buffoonery. It is transparently bullshit.
Did you read the whole opinion? It's pretty coherent, and makes sense if you've ever taken a civil procedure course.
You can't just be like "FaceBook censored me because of the FBI". You have to actually make a claim like "My post from July 5th was removed by FaceBook because of an email written to FaceBook from the FBI on July 6th". Preferably with both the email and post as exhibits.
[1] The question of whether someone has a First Amendment right to make a social media post has not yet been clearly established, and the Court didn't get to this question in this case.
And if the Government had coerced Facebook in violation of its Constitutional rights, I’m sure Facebook would sue the Government and quite possibly prevail.
It won't, because the companies don't own a private citizen's First Amendment right.
Edit: jfc, lol @ the debate around whether or not to call it a "ruling". The government can continue to talk to social media companies for now regardless of whatever the hell you call it. I regret contributing to this lol.
Is a ruling. It reverses the decision in "83 F. 4th 350" also known as Murthy v Missouri [1].
This ruling removes the injunction,
Therefore, SCOTUS rules that USG can talk to Social Media Companies.
I would claim a lay-person would say that removing a limitation from doing X could be stated as allowing X.
In Biden v. Nebraska, standing is exhaustively discussed in Part II.
In fact, there is no evidence they had ever built a wedding website: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/06/real-story-behin...
So, we have someone who has never suffered a harm from the law, was under no risk of prosecution, and who had never even had the opportunity to violate the law. If this person has standing, then standing is meaningless.
The fact that there's a blurb about it in a decision is irrelevant, does the court have a consistent philosophy on standing, or are they just winging it? It seems really obvious they're winging it.
It’s not hard to do better. The legal analysis of “I’m just doing what I want based on vibes” would be better, because at least it would be honest!
That fact that the basis of the ruling was standing does not change its practical effect. And that is what news readers are primarily interested in.
Except that the lack of standing kind of necessarily implies the lack of merits. The allegations in the case where that the government improperly influenced the social media companies to suppress speech; the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that their speech was suppressed as a result of this improper influence, and by doing so, they failed to reach standing. But if their speech wasn't suppressed by government influence, then there's no influence to be improper in the first place!
If you actually go through the decision and read it through, including the footnotes, it's clear that the court is pretty skeptical of the actual merits as well. Only one of the plaintiffs was able to come close to showing government influence in their censorship, but that argument is pretty weak given that they were repeatedly censored before they alleged the government influence began!
This isn't quite right and illustrates the subtleties involved in understanding these kinds of rulings.
When evaluating standing, courts don't determine whether any claims made are true or not. They simply evaluate whether a cognizable claim is made that, if true, would constitute a redressable injury that is traceable to actions of the defendants. According to the Court, the plaintiffs didn't make any such claims, and that's why the case was dismissed for lack of standing.
(Edited to remove a specific reference to the state plaintiffs.)
The state plaintiffs alleged standing on the basis that they have an interest in making sure their citizens have a "right to listen", and this was yeeted almost perfunctorily (it's like two pages of the decision). The states' lack of standing is not the major holding of this decision.
The private plaintiffs alleged standing on the basis that they were censored by the platforms as a result of the government's encouragement, and they were yeeted specifically because they failed to demonstrate any traceability of their censorship from the government's action.
Yes, I read the ~38 page majority opinion. (I gave up on the dissent as not being worth my time).
I'm actually kind of shocked that three members of our highest court wouldn't join the majority in dope-slapping the Fifth Circuit (if not in the body, at least in a footnote) for such shoddy work product. That circuit is packed with morons hand-picked from the Heritage Foundation who arguably have no business practicing law in the first place.
But how weird would it be if there was an industry segment the federal government was not allowed to talk to? The whole complaint seems like a thinly veiled attempt to say the federal government is not actually a government.
For example, the executive branch might promote some legislation that would be damaging to social media companies, and at the same time, send them requests to take down some posts. The social media companies comply because they want to be in the good graces of the White House while negotiating on the legislation.
This is called “jawboning:” https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/informal-government-coe...
In a hypothetical scenario where the USG tells Twitter to take down X post or we'll pass a future law. Whats the difference between that scenario and a City telling a Bank to remove a billboard or we'll re-zone you?
> In another case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected claims that a city violated a billboard owner’s First Amendment rights when it “politely but firmly suggested” that the bank that owned the plot of land on which the billboard stood “remove the unsightly billboards” and noted the possibility that, if the bank did not prove “interested in being responsive to this community[,]” the city might be forced to resort to costlier “legal procedures.” Because the city’s letters to the bank contained no “enforceable threats,” and the only sanctions the city could bring to bear against the bank were “civil or administrative proceedings under a zoning ordinance not yet drafted[,]” the Third Circuit held that the decision to terminate the billboard owner’s lease was private action beyond the scope of the First Amendment and that this was true even though the bank admitted that it removed the billboard in order to maintain its good relations with the city.
> Complicating the plaintiffs’ effort to demonstrate that each platform acted due to Government coercion, rather than its own judgment, is the fact that the platforms began to suppress the plain- tiffs’ COVID–19 content before the defendants’ challenged communi- cations started.
How can it be jawboning when the contact comes after a decision was already made? If even the plaintiffs aren’t alleging impropriety that follows normal causality, all that’s left is that NO contact can be legal.
Except with hard power! You can govern with hard power, but you can't talk to anyone.
It feels to me like a very thinly veiled attempt to sow distrust. To support a pre-constructed narrative that the government is out to get people. Feeling like the victim of government draws in a lot of votes, is one of the lowest common radicalizers available.
People are desperate to believe the US government is out there suppressing voices. There's a whole constructed reality that this is prevalent, happening en masse. There's just, like, hardly any evidence at all. Also weird as hell many of these same political factions blame Section 230, when it's expressly a shield allowing companies to host anything online without being in trouble, a defense against The Wolves of Wall Street bad guys Stratton Oakmont suppressing Prodigy.
It is inordinately hard for me to read any good faith in the outrage machine powering this all. There's a totally decoupled world of spin feeding this agenda, that seemingly doesn't need any connection to the real world to sustain & grow it's angst. And with remedies like "eliminate section 230" it's terrifying to imagine what all might be wrought by this persecution-delusion.
It's good to know the Fediverse at large (and Mastodon in particular) make this easier than ever. Perhaps this entire concern can be made moot by further adoption of decentralized technologies.