Justice Samuel Alito criticized the White House in a Supreme Court dissenting opinion on Wednesday, accusing the Biden administration of leading a “campaign to coerce Facebook” when it tried to moderate misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic on social media.
Joined by conservative colleagues Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, Alito disagreed with the majority of his six colleagues who filed lawsuits challenging the communications, finding that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing.
The majority opinion, authored by conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett, avoided addressing the merits of the free speech issue. Alito, however, said he “evaded” the court’s duty.
“For months, senior government officials have exerted relentless pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech,” Alito said. he wrote. “As the Court unreasonably refuses to address this grave threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent.”
As Barrett read her opinion, Alito mostly looked at a set of papers in front of him, his head sometimes resting on his hand. He did not read his dissent out loud on the bench.
Like Alito, Thomas also looked at most of the opinion reading and sometimes rested his head in his hand. About halfway through Barrett’s reading, Thomas could be seen putting his glasses back on, reading papers in his hands and occasionally looking up and out of the courtroom.
Gorsuch was absent from the bench Wednesday.
The lawsuit began when Republican state attorneys general and a group of private plaintiffs sued several Biden administration agencies and officials, arguing their calls for social media platforms to take down content related to COVID-19, the 2020 election and other controversial topics . amounted to unconstitutional censorship.
“I presume that much of what social media users had to say about COVID-19 and the pandemic had little lasting value,” Alito wrote in his dissent. “Some were undoubtedly false or misleading, and some may have been downright dangerous. But now we know that valuable speech was also suppressed.”
The Biden administration claimed it was merely encouraging platforms to moderate content so that communications do not cross the line into completely unconstitutional coercion.
Alito rejected that view in his dissent, insisting that White House officials “bullied” Facebook into deleting posts, and the platform’s response “resembled that of a subservient entity determined to remain in the good graces of a powerful taskmaster.” .
“If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years,” Alito wrote.
The courtroom audience was moderately crowded, with most looking directly at the judges.
The case was one of two rulings the Supreme Court handed down on Wednesday — notably, neither was a ruling on former President Trump’s high-profile immunity claim. Michael Dreeben, an attorney on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team who argued the case, was present at the court hearing, sitting in the second row of seats.
It remains unclear whether the court will finish its work by its self-imposed deadline of the last Friday in June. The judges have not yet issued opinions in 12 cases discussed during this period, although additional opinions are expected on Thursday and Friday morning.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
