Murthy v. Missouri
The Supreme Court threw out a lawsuit claiming federal officials illegally pressured social media platforms to suppress posts about COVID-19 and elections, ruling that the plaintiffs could not show their specific content was blocked because of government action rather than the platforms' own independent choices.
The decision leaves unanswered the larger question of whether government officials crossed a constitutional line in their communications with companies like Facebook and Twitter — a question that could return to the Court in a future case with stronger evidence.
“This requires a certain threshold showing: namely, that a particular defendant pressured a particular platform to censor a particular topic before that platform suppressed a particular plaintiff's speech on that topic.”
The majority's core rule requiring plaintiffs to show a specific causal chain, not a broad pattern of government-platform pressure.
How it got here: A federal district court in Louisiana issued a broad preliminary injunction; the Fifth Circuit affirmed in part; the Supreme Court stayed the injunction, treated the government's emergency application as a petition for certiorari, and granted review.
The Case in Depth
What happened
During the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 and 2022 election seasons, officials from the White House, the Surgeon General's Office, the CDC, the FBI, and CISA regularly communicated with major social media platforms about content they considered misinformation. Two states (Missouri and Louisiana) and five individuals — three doctors, a news website operator, and a healthcare activist — claimed the government used this pressure to get platforms like Facebook and Twitter to remove or restrict their posts.
The question before the Court
Did social media users and two states who say the federal government pressured platforms to remove their COVID-19 and election content have the legal right to sue federal officials to stop that pressure?
The Court's answer
No — none of the plaintiffs had the legal right to bring this lawsuit. To sue in federal court, a person must show a concrete injury that is caused by the specific defendant they are targeting and that a court order would actually fix. Here, any injury the plaintiffs suffered depended on what private social media companies decided to do, not on direct government action — making the causal chain between officials and censorship uncertain.
Examining each plaintiff individually, the Court found no one convincingly linked their specific content restrictions to specific government defendants. Even the strongest case — healthcare activist Jill Hines, whose Facebook pages were repeatedly restricted — rested on tenuous connections. The intense government-platform communications had substantially wound down before Hines filed suit in 2022, and platforms were continuing to enforce their own misinformation policies independently of any ongoing pressure. An injunction against officials who had already scaled back their involvement was therefore unlikely to change platforms' behavior.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Social media users who believe the government pushed platforms to suppress their speech cannot pursue these particular lawsuits without far stronger evidence tying a specific official's conduct to a specific post being removed. The ruling does not clear the government of wrongdoing — it only says these plaintiffs, on this record, could not prove their injuries were caused by federal officials.
What changes now
The case returns to the lower courts for further proceedings. The sweeping preliminary injunction blocking the government from communicating with platforms remains dissolved. To revive the lawsuit, plaintiffs would need substantially stronger evidence connecting specific officials' actions to specific content decisions affecting their specific posts. The Court left open whether the government's conduct violated the First Amendment — that question awaits a future case built on a clearer factual record.
What this does not decide
The Court explicitly declines to decide whether federal officials' communications with social media platforms violated the First Amendment, and it expresses no view on whether the Fifth Circuit's legal standard for when government pressure becomes unconstitutional 'state action' was correctly stated. Both questions remain open for a future case.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Alito
Justice Alito argues the majority applies an unrealistically demanding standard for traceability and redressability, and that plaintiff Jill Hines plainly had standing. He would have reached the First Amendment question and found that high-ranking White House officials unconstitutionally coerced Facebook into suppressing speech — conduct he calls more dangerous than the blunt censorship the Court struck down in a related case earlier that term. He warns that today's ruling signals to future officials that a sufficiently sophisticated pressure campaign may escape judicial review.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The constitutional rule that courts can only hear actual 'cases or controversies' requires every plaintiff to show three things: a concrete injury, a clear causal link to the defendant they're suing, and a showing that a court order would actually fix the harm. Because the plaintiffs sought only a forward-looking injunction (not money for past harm), they had to show a substantial risk of future injury traceable to specific government officials — not just that they had been hurt in the past.
- When a plaintiff's injury depends on the independent choices of a third party not in court — here, private platforms — standing is especially hard to establish. The plaintiffs had to show that specific government defendants would likely cause specific platforms to restrict specific plaintiffs' speech in the future, rather than that the platforms were acting on their own longstanding content policies.
- Standing must be proven plaintiff-by-plaintiff and defendant-by-defendant — it cannot be assumed for a group. The Fifth Circuit erred by treating all government agencies, all platforms, and all plaintiffs as interchangeable, effectively saying 'the government pressured the platforms, and the platforms censored the plaintiffs' without tracing any specific chain of causation.
- The platforms had strong independent reasons to moderate content — they had been doing so before any government contact, and they often rejected officials' requests or made their own editorial judgments even after communications began. This weakened any inference that platform decisions were driven by government pressure rather than the platforms' own choices.
- Examining each plaintiff one by one, the Court found the causal links too thin. The state plaintiffs never established when Facebook acted against a state official's post. The three doctors' restrictions on Twitter and LinkedIn could not be tied to White House or CDC communications with Facebook. The news website operator's restrictions traced to his own platform's independent rules. Even Jill Hines — who made the best showing — could not establish likely future harm because the White House and CDC had largely stopped their intense communications with Facebook by the time she filed suit.
- On redressability, the evidence showed platforms were still enforcing their COVID-19 misinformation policies even after the federal government wound down its pandemic response. Because no ongoing pressure campaign was evident, enjoining officials was unlikely to prompt platforms to change their behavior — failing the requirement that a court order would actually fix the harm.