Next Monday the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, which poses the question of whether federal officials violated the First Amendment when they persistently pressured social media platforms to curtail "misinformation." That is what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit concluded last September, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is urging the justices to affirm that decision.
FIRE says the 5th Circuit was right to conclude that Biden administration officials engaged in "significant encouragement" of speech suppression and that they crossed the line between persuasion and coercion. But the organization's brief also highlights the First Amendment "hypocrisy" of the lead plaintiffs in this case, which it says "inadvertently" reinforces their argument.
