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Today the Supreme Court will hold oral hearings on what could be an important First Amendment case. During the height of the COVID pandemic, various government agencies contacted social media companies and politely asked them to remove misleading information from their sites. It was pointed out that if people believed what they read there, they or other people could be harmed by the misinformation (e.g., taking horse dewormer and then thinking you were immune to COVID-19). The government never threatened any sanctions for failure to follow the advice. The officials who issued the requests hoped that the companies had enough sense to do this on their own.
Well, the conservative attorneys general of Missouri and Mississippi couldn't stand this, even though none of the companies or agencies are located in those states, so they sued. After all, if the government gets away with asking companies not to publish harmful lies from users, pretty soon they could be censoring harmful lies from politicians in their states. The case made it to the Supreme Court, and today the Court will hold oral hearings on the case.
The constitutional issue is that Congress may make no laws abridging the freedom of speech. Is a government agency asking a private company to stop publishing harmful lies sort of the same thing as Congress passing a law making it a crime for a private company to publish harmful lies? In other words, were the companies coerced and does that rise to the level of abridging a First Amendment right the companies have (even though the plaintiffs weren't exactly involved)?
Naturally, this issue has become part of the culture wars. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and 44 other House Republicans have filed an amicus brief claiming that the Biden administration has suppressed conservative speech online. It is possible that it is only conservatives that are posting the harmful information, which is why they feel they are under attack.
We don't know how the Court will rule, of course, but we do know that when the Fifth Circuit ruled on the case last year and the Supreme Court paused the circuit court's injunction, Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas dissented. That suggests that there are at least three votes for ruling that the government may not even ask social media companies to suppress harmful lies. (V)