The justices' apparent reluctance matters because the case concerns the boundary between government persuasion and impermissible pressure on private moderation decisions. Related coverage later recorded the Court's refusal to impose the requested limits, consistent with the caution evident at argument.
First-order effects
Federal officials and social-media platforms faced continued uncertainty during the appeal, but no immediate restoration of the lower court's broad contact restrictions.
A skeptical Court posture reduced the near-term likelihood that government outreach about allegedly false content would be categorically constrained by judicial order.
Second-order effects
Platforms retain greater room to receive and act on government reports without a new court-defined bright line, while needing to distinguish voluntary moderation from conduct that could be characterized as state coercion.
Litigants challenging government-platform coordination must contend with a Court reluctant to convert disputed communications into sweeping limits on executive outreach.
Third-order effects
If this approach holds, disputes over online speech may turn less on blanket bans on government contact and more on fact-specific evidence of coercion, attribution, and platform independence.
The case is part of a broader judicial effort to define constitutional limits for public officials' conduct on private digital services without treating platforms as ordinary government channels.
The trend: Courts are increasingly being asked to draw workable First Amendment boundaries around government influence over privately governed online speech systems.
In a rare bit of good Supreme Court news, it seems like the justices will not prohibit the federal government from communicating threats to platforms https://www.platformer.news/ ...
Jawboning by foreign powers is FAR more aggressive than by U.S. officials. I'd like to see a U.S. policy debate about how to prevent/limit undue government influence by those actors, and continue to think that the entire thrust of USG policy around social media simply abdicates …
I was listening to the arguments. There was more nuance there than I expected but in general, as one of the Justice's said, they fail to demonstrate any connection between encouragement and action, especially when social media so frequently ignored other encouragement. …
A few of the justices reflexively drew parallels between social media and legacy news publishers, recognizing that platforms often make their own decisions on what content to host. We didn't make this its own highlight but the framing seems notable in light of the NetChoice case…
Key takeaways from today's Supreme Court arguments on the jawboning case: Even many of the court's conservatives seemed to side with the Biden administration https://www.cnn.com/...
“A majority of the justices appeared convinced that government officials should be able to try to persuade private companies, whether news organizations or tech platforms, not to publish information so long as the requests are not backed by coercive threats.” https://www.nytimes.…
If you are following the Murthy vs Missouri arguments you might be interested in all the factual misstatements by the plaintiffs regarding the 1st Amendment protected academic research of Stanford, the University of Washington, and others. …
Jawboning is a bad thing! We should all be able to agree on that. Limits on what is ok in the era of social media are worth hashing out. But cases establishing the limits of what govt can and can't do should be rooted in actual facts.
The lawyer for the Republican states and plaintiffs is getting absolutely shredded by the justices' questions so far. Starting to think the right-leaning lower courts did them no favors by accepting shaky arguments so uncritically... https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... [image]
After noting the White House's communication with social media companies over COVID-19, SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito says he “cannot imagine” the White House is taking that approach with print media: “It's treating Facebook and these other platforms like they're subordinates.” [vi…