Murthy v. Missouri
The Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit accusing the federal government of pressuring social-media companies to censor users' posts, ruling that the plaintiffs could not show a close enough connection between specific government actions and their own specific content restrictions.
The decision sidesteps the central First Amendment question — whether government officials can lawfully pressure private platforms to suppress protected speech — leaving that issue unresolved for future cases with stronger evidence.
How it got here: A federal district court issued a broad preliminary injunction; the Fifth Circuit largely affirmed; the Supreme Court stayed the injunction and granted certiorari.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Two states (Missouri and Louisiana) and five individuals — including three doctors who questioned COVID-19 policies, a news website owner, and a healthcare activist — claimed the federal government pressured Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms to remove or suppress posts about the pandemic and the 2020 election. White House officials, the Surgeon General, the CDC, the FBI, and a cybersecurity agency had all communicated extensively with the platforms about content they considered misinformation. The plaintiffs sued dozens of federal officials and agencies seeking a court order to stop the pressure.
The question before the Court
Could the states and social-media users sue federal officials for allegedly pressuring platforms like Facebook to remove or suppress their posts about COVID-19 and the 2020 election?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that none of the plaintiffs could show the legal right to bring this lawsuit. To sue government officials for pressuring social-media companies to remove speech, a plaintiff must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, a specific platform will restrict their speech *because* of ongoing government pressure — not merely that both events occurred. The platforms had their own independent, longstanding reasons to moderate content, and the plaintiffs could not trace their specific restrictions to specific government actions.
The plaintiff with the strongest case — a healthcare activist whose COVID-19-related Facebook posts were repeatedly restricted — still fell short. Facebook had already been targeting her content before the pressure campaign intensified, and the most intense government-platform communications had wound down by mid-2022 when she filed suit. With no clear ongoing link between government conduct and a risk of future censorship, no plaintiff had standing, and the Court dismissed the case without deciding whether the government's behavior was unconstitutional.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Anyone seeking to challenge government pressure on social-media companies must now trace their own specific restrictions to a specific official's actions — not just show that the government pushed platforms generally and that their content was removed. Future plaintiffs will need to build a much tighter factual record before a court will agree to hear such a case on the merits.
What changes now
The case is sent back to lower courts for further proceedings consistent with the Supreme Court's opinion. The plaintiffs could attempt to refile with a stronger, more specific factual record linking government actions to their particular content restrictions. The underlying First Amendment question — whether government officials can lawfully pressure private platforms to suppress protected speech — remains entirely open and could be raised in a future lawsuit by a plaintiff who can demonstrate a clearer, ongoing causal chain.
What this does not decide
The Court explicitly did not decide whether the federal government's pressure on social-media platforms violated the First Amendment. It also expressly declined to say whether the Fifth Circuit correctly described the legal standard for when government conduct transforms a private company's actions into government action.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Alito
“The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.”Justice Alito warns that the majority's refusal to reach the merits gives future officials a roadmap for covert censorship campaigns.
Justice Alito argued that at least Jill Hines had standing and the Court was obligated to reach the First Amendment merits. In his view, months of aggressive White House pressure caused Facebook to repeatedly change its moderation policies in ways that foreseeably harmed Hines — satisfying traceability and redressability. He would have held the government's conduct unconstitutional, warning that by avoiding the merits the Court leaves a 'successful campaign of coercion' as an 'attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.'
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began with standing — the constitutional requirement that a plaintiff show a real, concrete injury traceable to the defendant's actions and fixable by a court order. Because the plaintiffs wanted to stop the government (not the platforms themselves) from acting, they had to show a substantial risk that, in the near future, a platform would restrict their speech specifically because of ongoing government pressure — not as an exercise of the platform's own independent judgment.
- The Court rejected the Fifth Circuit's approach of treating all government agencies, all plaintiffs, and all platforms as one unified whole. Standing cannot be 'dispensed in gross' — each plaintiff must show that a particular government defendant pressured a particular platform to censor a particular topic, and that the platform then restricted that plaintiff's speech on that topic rather than acting on its own policy.
- On past injuries: The Court found the platforms had longstanding, independent reasons to moderate COVID-19 and election-related content — often strengthening their policies before or separately from any government outreach. This undermined the inference that any particular restriction was government-caused rather than the platform's own choice, complicating every plaintiff's effort to establish traceability.
- Walking through each plaintiff: The states pointed to a Facebook action with no timing evidence establishing causation. The three doctor-plaintiffs highlighted Twitter and LinkedIn restrictions but pointed only to Facebook's White House conversations. The news-website owner's claimed injury rested on Twitter acting under its own rules about intimate media. Only the healthcare activist, Jill Hines, came close, but most of her links were 'tenuous.'
- On forward-looking relief: The Court found the intense government-platform communications had substantially subsided by mid-2022, when Hines filed suit. The White House issued no directives and threatened no consequences in the months before her complaint. The platforms also continued enforcing their own COVID-19 policies independently after the federal government wound down its pandemic response, making an injunction against government officials unlikely to change what the platforms do.
- The 'right to listen' theory failed separately: while the First Amendment protects a listener's interest in receiving information, the Court has recognized that right only where the listener has a concrete, specific connection to the censored speaker. Here, no plaintiff pointed to any specific instance of someone else's censored content that caused them identifiable harm — the theory would have given every social-media user standing to sue over any other user's censorship.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Department of Commerce v. New York (588 U. S. 752)
There, census-citizenship-question evidence clearly predicted third-party behavior; here the social-media evidence is too murky to support the same inference.