Murthy v. Missouri Revisions: 6/26/24
The Supreme Court threw out a lawsuit by states and individual social-media users who claimed federal officials had pressured platforms like Facebook and Twitter to suppress their posts, ruling that none of the plaintiffs could show a specific enough connection between the government's actions and their own restricted content.
The decision leaves the underlying constitutional question — whether the government's communications with social-media companies were an unconstitutional attempt to silence protected speech — entirely unresolved and open for future litigation.
How it got here: A federal district court issued a sweeping preliminary injunction against federal officials; the Fifth Circuit affirmed it in modified form; the government sought an emergency stay, which the Supreme Court granted and then converted into a full merits review.
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, sued dozens of federal agencies and officials. They alleged that White House staff, the Surgeon General, the CDC, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had pressured Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms to remove or demote posts about COVID-19 vaccines and the 2020 election that the government labeled misinformation.
The question before the Court
Can social-media users and state governments sue federal officials who allegedly pressured social-media companies to remove or restrict certain posts about COVID-19 and elections?
The Court's answer
No — not these plaintiffs, on this record. The Court ruled that neither the two states nor the five individual social-media users had demonstrated the legal connection required to bring this lawsuit. To get a court order against government officials, a plaintiff must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, a specific official's conduct will cause a specific platform to restrict their specific speech — not just that the government communicated broadly with platforms about misinformation categories.
Here, the platforms had been moderating similar content independently before any government involvement began, and often exercised their own judgment even during the period of government pressure. By the time most plaintiffs filed suit in 2022, the intense government-platform communications of 2021 had substantially wound down. No plaintiff could draw a clear line from a particular government communication to a particular restriction on their own account — and without that concrete connection, federal courts had no business stepping in. The Court also rejected the plaintiffs' broader theory that they had a First Amendment right to read content that other users had been prevented from posting, finding that theory far too sweeping to confer legal standing.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Social-media users who believe federal officials pressured platforms to remove their posts must pinpoint a traceable link between a specific government communication and their own specific content being suppressed — not just show that officials broadly pressed platforms about misinformation. That is a demanding standard, and this record could not meet it. Anyone seeking to relitigate similar First Amendment claims will need much tighter factual proof.
What changes now
The case returns to lower courts for proceedings consistent with the ruling. The preliminary injunction against federal officials is vacated. Because the Court resolved the case entirely on standing, the underlying First Amendment question — whether the government's communications with social-media platforms were unconstitutionally coercive — was never reached and remains open. Future plaintiffs with tighter factual showings could attempt to relitigate those constitutional questions.
What this does not decide
The Court explicitly declined to rule on whether the government's communications with social-media platforms were unconstitutionally coercive under the First Amendment, and expressed no view on whether the Fifth Circuit correctly defined the legal standard for when government pressure turns private action into government censorship. Both questions remain entirely open.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Alito
Justice Alito argued that plaintiff Jill Hines plainly had standing — her Facebook content was being censored when she sued, that censorship was a predictable result of the White House's months-long pressure campaign, and an injunction would have redressed her harm. Reaching the merits, Alito concluded that the officials' conduct — persistent demands, thinly veiled threats of antitrust and regulatory retaliation, and relentless public accusations — crossed the line from permissible persuasion into unconstitutional coercion, warning that the majority's decision hands future officials a roadmap for sophisticated censorship campaigns that courts will decline to scrutinize.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The threshold question was whether any plaintiff had standing — the legal right to bring this case in federal court. Standing requires showing three things: a concrete injury, a traceable causal link between that injury and the defendant's actions, and a likelihood that a court order would fix the harm. For an injunction (which only blocks future conduct), the plaintiff must show a real and imminent threat of repeated future harm, not merely past incidents.
- A special complication arose because it was the social-media platforms — private companies, not the government — that actually restricted the plaintiffs' posts. The plaintiffs did not sue the platforms; they sued the government officials. So to establish standing, each plaintiff had to show that a specific government defendant's conduct would predictably cause a specific platform to restrict their speech going forward — not just that government communications and platform restrictions existed at the same time.
- Examining each plaintiff's claimed restrictions individually, the Court found the evidence of causal connection weak across the board. Platforms had strengthened their content-moderation policies before government involvement began, routinely rejected government-flagged content that didn't violate platform rules, and consulted outside experts as well. The Fifth Circuit had wrongly lumped all defendants, all platforms, and all plaintiffs together as unified blocs, but standing must be shown for each plaintiff against each defendant.
- Even the strongest plaintiff — healthcare activist Jill Hines — could not show likely future harm. The intense government-platform communications that occurred through 2021 had substantially subsided by mid-2022, when Hines filed suit. Without evidence of an ongoing pressure campaign at the time of filing, the risk that future platform restrictions would be traceable to the government was speculative rather than substantial.
- The plaintiffs also argued a redressability problem blocked the injunction: even if some past restrictions were initially triggered by government pressure, the platforms had continued enforcing their own COVID-19 misinformation policies independently — even after the federal government's pandemic response wound down in 2023. Blocking the government officials would therefore be unlikely to stop the platforms from doing what they were already doing on their own.
- Finally, the individual plaintiffs argued they had a First Amendment 'right to listen' — an interest in reading content that other users had been prevented from posting. The Court rejected this theory as too broad, explaining that a listener's right to receive information only creates standing when the listener has a concrete, specific connection to a particular silenced speaker. A general interest in unfettered speech on social media is not enough.