Alito: White House Attempted to 'Coerce Facebook'

In a dissenting Supreme Court opinion Wednesday, Justice Samuel Alito accused the Biden administration of orchestrating a "campaign to coerce Facebook" when it tried to moderate misinformation on the coronavirus pandemic on social media, The Hill reported.

Alito, along with fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, dissented from the majority, which rejected lawsuits challenging the communications, because the plaintiffs had no legal standing. 

Alito said the majority's avoiding addressing the merits of the free speech issue "shirks" the court's duty, writing "for months, high-ranking government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans' free speech. Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent." 

The lawsuits argued that the Biden administration's urging for social media platforms to take down content connected to the pandemic, the 2020 election, and other controversial topics were unconstitutional censorship, according to The Hill.

Alito wrote in his dissent: "I assume that a fair portion of what social media users had to say about COVID-19 and the pandemic was of little lasting value. Some was undoubtedly untrue or misleading, and some may have been downright dangerous."

However, he pointed out that "we now know that valuable speech was also suppressed." 

Alito also rejected the Biden administration contention that it was only encouraging the platforms to moderate the content, with the justice insisting in his dissent that White House officials "browbeat" Facebook into deleting posts, and that Facebook's response "resembled that of a subservient entity determined to stay in the good graces of a powerful taskmaster."

Alito noted that "if the lower courts' assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years."

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