Samuel Alito slams Supreme Court for using 'new and higher standard'

justice Samuel Alito exploded the Supreme Court for using a “new and improved standard” when ruling in a social media censorship case that sided with the Biden administration.

The Supreme Court voted 6-3 Wednesday that a group of Republican-led states lacked standing to sue the federal government over its efforts to combat misinformation on social media platforms. Alito wrote the dissenting opinion in Murthy v. Missouri and the Judges joined Clarence Thomas i Neil Gorsuch.

In his dissent, Alito argued that the Court reached its conclusion “by applying
He said that in order for the plaintiffs to be able to sue the White House, they had to identify a “causal connection” between the actions of those officials and the alleged censorship, but they did not have to prove that the censorship. occurred only because of these actions.

“The Court finds that Facebook began censoring misinformation related to COVID-19 before White House officials and the Office of the Surgeon General got involved,” Alito wrote. “And, in the Court's view, that fact makes it difficult to untangle censorship caused by government censorship that Facebook might have. undertaken anyway.”

One of the plaintiffs in the case was Jill Hines, a health activist who was subject to Facebook's content moderation policies for posts she wrote questioning COVID-19 health guidelines, including vaccines. Alito argued that it was “reasonable to infer” that since Hines' posts were being moderated when the White House was in communication with social media companies about their concerns about misinformation, Hines was being censored in part because of the pressure Facebook was facing from the government.

“When the White House pressured Facebook to amend some of its policies related to speech in which Hines engaged, those amendments necessarily affected some of Facebook's censorship decisions,” Alito's dissent says. “Nothing more is needed.”

“What the Court seems to want is a series of rigid links: from a particular coercive communication to a particular change in Facebook's rules or practice and then to a particular adverse action against Hines,” the judge wrote . “No such chain was required in the Department of Commerce case, and it shouldn't be required here either.”

In Department of Commerce v. New Yorkthat the Supreme Court decided in 2019, the court found that the Secretary of Commerce did not violate the Constitution or the Census Act by deciding to reinstate a citizenship question on the 2020 census questionnaire.

However, in Murthythe Court found that the plaintiffs had “no concrete link between their injuries and the conduct of the defendants.”

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “With one or two potentially viable links, Hines makes the best showing of all the plaintiffs. Still, Facebook targeted his pages before nearly all of his communications with the White House and the CDCwhich weakens the inference that its subsequent restrictions can likely be traced to “government-coerced enforcement” of Facebook's policies, rather than Facebook's independent judgment.”