On Monday, the censorship-industrial complex was put on trial when the
Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the landmark free speech case Murthy
v. Missouri.

Evidence in the case revealed that in the run-up to the 2020 election, and
increasingly thereafter, a raft of federal agencies both directly and via
cutouts cajoled, coerced, and colluded with social media companies to
censor wrongthinking Americans at a magnitude of millions of posts on
matters ranging from the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story to the
integrity of mass mail-in balloting and the efficacy of Covid vaccines.

The Louisiana district court that originally heard the case found, and a
5th Circuit Court of Appeals panel affirmed, that these efforts — emanating
from entities such as the Biden White House, FBI, and CDC to control the
digital public square, interfering in our elections and skewing public
policy debates — likely constituted a massive assault on the First
Amendment.

The feds, the courts suggested, had effectively turned the likes of
Facebook and X/Twitter into its deputized speech police, becoming state
actors whose “content moderation” decisions violated constitutional
restrictions on abridging speech.

The district court issued a preliminary injunction, that the appeals court
narrowed and modified but upheld, to freeze the speech policing during the
pendency of the case. It prohibited the Biden White House and implicated
agencies from taking any actions: “formal or informal, directly or
indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to
remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their
algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”

So the feds brought their case to the Supreme Court. Claiming that
restrictions on their ability to pressure social media companies to censor
would “irreparably harm” the government, violating its right to influence
the digital public square in support of the state’s national security and
public health agenda, it asked the court to rule on whether the government
had indeed engaged in a First Amendment violation of the highest order, and
on the “terms and breadth” of the preliminary injunction.

Most disturbingly, if oral arguments were any indication, it appears the
government may prevail and eviscerate our First Amendment in the process.

Irrespective of how it comes down in this case, the federal government’s
position combined with the clear-cut support from the court’s three
left-most judges speaks to the extent to which free speech is in deep
trouble in this country.

What follows are some of the most critical, and often disturbing, takeaways
from oral arguments.

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<https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/21/8-big-takeaways-for-free-speech-in-landmark-murthy-v-missouri-censorship-case/>

<https://archive.ph/tfT1d>