Murthy v. Missouri Revisions: 6/27/24
The Supreme Court threw out a sweeping injunction against federal officials who had allegedly pressured social-media companies to suppress COVID-19 and election-related posts, ruling that none of the people who sued could show a concrete enough link between the officials' actions and their specific content restrictions.
The decision leaves the underlying First Amendment question — whether the government's pressure campaign was unconstitutional — completely unanswered, and sets a demanding standard for anyone who wants to sue the government over social-media censorship carried out by private platforms.
How it got here: The District Court issued a broad preliminary injunction; the Fifth Circuit affirmed in significant part; the federal officials sought emergency relief and the Supreme Court stayed the injunction, then granted review.
The Case in Depth
What happened
During the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election season, major social-media platforms removed or demoted posts about vaccines, public-health measures, and election integrity. Two states — Missouri and Louisiana — and five individual users, including three doctors, a news-website owner, and a healthcare activist, claimed that federal officials secretly pressured the platforms to suppress their specific content in violation of the First Amendment. They sued dozens of federal officials and agencies seeking a court order to stop the practice.
The question before the Court
Can social-media users and states sue federal officials for allegedly pressuring platforms to remove their posts, when the platforms — not the government — actually carried out the restrictions?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that none of the plaintiffs established the right to sue the federal officials they named. To obtain an injunction against the government, the plaintiffs had to show a substantial risk that, in the near future, at least one social-media platform would restrict their speech because of specific government pressure. But the record showed the platforms had strong independent reasons to moderate the same content, and had started doing so before the government's challenged communications even began.
The Court also found the intense government-platform communications had substantially wound down by 2022, when most plaintiffs filed suit, making it speculative to assume future government-caused harm. A separate "right to listen" theory — that users have standing to challenge censorship of any other user's speech — was rejected as impermissibly broad. Because no plaintiff cleared these hurdles, the Court said it had no power to reach the underlying First Amendment question.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
People who believe the government pushed social-media companies to silence them face a steep legal hill: they must trace a specific official's pressure to a specific platform's decision about their specific speech, at a time when the platforms had strong independent reasons to moderate the same content. That evidentiary burden will be hard to meet in future cases with similar facts.
What changes now
The case returns to the lower courts for further proceedings consistent with the Supreme Court's standing analysis. The underlying First Amendment question — whether the government's pressure on social-media companies amounted to unconstitutional coercion — remains entirely unanswered. Plaintiffs could attempt to refile with stronger, more individualized evidence, though the Court's analysis signals that the evidentiary bar would be very difficult to clear on the existing record.
What this does not decide
The ruling says nothing about whether the government's communications with social-media companies were unconstitutional; the Court expressly declined to reach that question. It also does not decide what legal standard governs when government persuasion of a private company crosses into unconstitutional coercion of speech.
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 warning that the majority's refusal to reach the First Amendment question leaves a dangerous template for government censorship unchecked.
Justice Alito argued that at least one plaintiff — healthcare activist Jill Hines — clearly had standing and that the Court was obligated to reach the First Amendment merits. In his telling, White House officials repeatedly hectored and implicitly threatened Facebook into tightening its censorship policies, and those policy changes predictably caused Hines's posts to be restricted. He charged the majority with applying an unjustifiably heightened standard for traceability and redressability, and concluded on the merits that the officials' conduct amounted to unconstitutional coercion under the principles of Bantam Books and this Term's decision in NRA v. Vullo.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- Standing doctrine — the threshold legal requirement for any federal lawsuit — requires a plaintiff to show a concrete injury that is fairly traceable to the defendant and likely to be fixed by a court order. When the plaintiff seeks forward-looking relief like an injunction, the injury must be real and imminent, not speculative. And when actual harm flows from a private party's independent decision — here, the platforms' own moderation choices — the plaintiff must still show the government defendant caused that third-party action.
- The Court refused to treat all defendants, all plaintiffs, and all platforms as unified wholes. Because 'standing is not dispensed in gross,' each plaintiff had to show, for each defendant, that a specific official pressured a specific platform about a specific topic and that the platform then restricted that plaintiff's speech on that topic — all before the Court could presume any causal link.
- The evidence undermined those links: major platforms had independent reasons and pre-existing policies to remove COVID-19 misinformation before the government's challenged communications began, and on several occasions the platforms told White House officials that flagged content didn't actually violate company rules. The Fifth Circuit erred by attributing every platform decision at least partly to the government defendants rather than examining each restriction individually.
- For an injunction (which is always forward-looking), the plaintiffs had to show a substantial ongoing risk of future harm traceable to the named government defendants. But by 2022, when most plaintiffs filed suit, the frequent and intense 2021 communications between officials and the platforms had substantially subsided — leaving only speculation that future platform restrictions would be caused by those specific defendants rather than by the platforms' own independent judgment.
- A separate 'right to listen' theory — that social-media users have a First Amendment interest in reading any other user's speech, giving them standing to sue over anyone else's censorship — was rejected as boundlessly broad. The First Amendment right to receive information requires a concrete, specific connection to the censored speaker, not a general interest in unfettered social-media content, and none of the plaintiffs identified specific speakers or specific restrictions that caused them identifiable harm on that theory.