The Alito-Jordan Report in Murthy v. Missouri: How Facebook and the Biden Administration Colluded with Government and Social Media to Enforc a First Amendment Law

Alito focused on how Facebook moderated misinformation, with examples including the safety and efficacy of vaccines, as well as the lab leak hypothesis. It also mentions a report written by the House Judiciary Committee which is chaired by Jim Jordan. Jordan attended oral arguments in Murthy.

The successful campaign of coercion in this case is an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think, according to Alito. If a campaign is carried out with enough sophistication it could get by, he says.

In his dissent, Alito wrote that “valuable speech was … suppressed.” A footnote that immediately followed cited the lab leak hypothesis, a minority scientific theory that covid originated from a laboratory in China.

Justice Barrett wrote the majority opinion, and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Samuel Alito was joined by two other justices in dissent.

The attorneys general from Louisiana and Missouri brought a case against government agencies that they claimed coerced the platforms to take down conservative-leaning content violating the First Amendment rights of their citizens. Specifically, the case alleged that government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) coerced social media companies into removing content, including posts that questioned the use of masks in preventing Covid-19 and the validity of the 2020 election.

The House Judiciary Committee’s report stated that the Biden White House coerced companies to suppress free speech. The Republicans made a “last ditch effort to influence the Supreme Court opinion” in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, said the congressman in a hearing a day before the report was published.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt claimed in a statement that members of the Biden administration colluded with social media companies to remove false information related to the lab-leak theory, the efficacy of masks, and more. The government was banned from communicating with social media platforms by a federal judge.

The government, social media platforms, and government entities are vital in providing information that social media companies are able to use to ensure users know what to do in an emergency, or where to vote. The government is able to obtain accurate information through partnerships with social media.

Is the NRA threatening to sue banks for violating the National Rifle Association (NRA) v. Vullo?

David Greene, director of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, stated that the decision of the court earlier in thecycle on the National Rifle Association v. Vullo case was likely an indicator as to how it would approach the Murthy decision. The New York Department of Financial Services pressured banks to not do business with the NRA and suppressed its advocacy in the case of Maria Vullo. In a 9–0 decision, the court ruled that the NRA had presented enough evidence that a case against Vullo could move forward. The opinion stated that the case was about Vullo threatening to wield her power against those refusing to aid her campaign to punish the National Rifle Association for their gun promotion advocacy.

“Other than that the facts involved are sort of politically motivated, the legal issue itself is not something that I think traditionally breaks down along partisan lines,” says Greene.

But Greene says that without clear guidelines, state, local, and federal government bodies—of all political leanings—could feel freer to contact platforms now. “We will see a lot more of that type of government involvement in these processes,” he says.