Supreme Court allows Biden admin to continue asking tech firms to address controversial social media posts
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday said it would indefinitely block a lower court order that curbed efforts by the Biden administration to get tech companies to remove misleading social media posts from their platforms.
Many of the posts that have raised concerns over the years including topics, including COVID-19 and election security.
The justices will hear arguments in a lawsuit filed by Louisiana, Missouri and other parties accusing administration officials of unconstitutionally squelching conservative points of view in a First Amendment case.
Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas would have rejected the emergency appeal from the Biden administration.
The White House can continue requests tech companies combat social media posts the government claims are misleading, according to a U.S. Supreme Court move Friday. (AP Photo/File / AP Images)
"At this time in the history of our country, what the Court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the Government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news. That is most unfortunate," Alito wrote in dissent.
The lawsuit said the White House communications staffers, the surgeon general and the FBI are among those that coerced changes in online content on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and other media platforms.
"The Fifth Circuit erred in finding coercion by the White House, Surgeon General’s office, and FBI because the court did not identify any threat, implicit or explicit, of adverse consequences for noncompliance," Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote. "Indeed, the Fifth Circuit adopted a definition of coercion so lax that it deemed the FBI’s actions coercive simply because the FBI is a powerful law enforcement agency and the platforms sometimes (but not always) removed the content it flagged."
The White House can continue requests asking tech companies to combat social media posts the government claims are misleading, according to a U.S. Supreme Court move Friday. (Matt Cardy/Getty Images/File / Getty Images)
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Earlier this month, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals extended the scope of an injunction in place that limits the Biden administration's communication with big tech companies to include the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security.
GOP Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is leading the litigation against the Biden administration, said the CISA is the "nerve center" of the White House's "vast censorship enterprise"
Fox News Digital's Brianna Herlihy and The Associated Press contributed to this report.