When the censors got it wrong

 Federalist:

On Monday, the censorship-industrial complex was put on trial when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the landmark free speech case Murthy v. Missouri.

Evidence in the case revealed that in the run-up to the 2020 election, and increasingly thereafter, a raft of federal agencies both directly and via cutouts cajoled, coerced, and colluded with social media companies to censor wrongthinking Americans at a magnitude of millions of posts on matters ranging from the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story to the integrity of mass mail-in balloting and the efficacy of Covid vaccines.

The Louisiana district court that originally heard the case found, and a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals panel affirmed, that these efforts — emanating from entities such as the Biden White House, FBI, and CDC to control the digital public square, interfering in our elections and skewing public policy debates — likely constituted a massive assault on the First Amendment.

The feds, the courts suggested, had effectively turned the likes of Facebook and X/Twitter into its deputized speech police, becoming state actors whose “content moderation” decisions violated constitutional restrictions on abridging speech.

The district court issued a preliminary injunction, that the appeals court narrowed and modified but upheld, to freeze the speech policing during the pendency of the case. It prohibited the Biden White House and implicated agencies from taking any 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.”

So the feds brought their case to the Supreme Court. Claiming that restrictions on their ability to pressure social media companies to censor would “irreparably harm” the government, violating its right to influence the digital public square in support of the state’s national security and public health agenda, it asked the court to rule on whether the government had indeed engaged in a First Amendment violation of the highest order, and on the “terms and breadth” of the preliminary injunction.

Most disturbingly, if oral arguments were any indication, it appears the government may prevail and eviscerate our First Amendment in the process.
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The Biden White House should not be trusted when it comes to free speech.  They are like a toddler with a loaded pistol.