US Supreme Court extends pause on order curbing Biden social media contacts
By Nate Raymond and Andrew Chung
(Reuters) — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday extended a temporary block on an order restricting the ability of President Joe Biden's administration to encourage social media companies to remove content it deemed misinformation about COVID-19 and other matters of public concern.
The decision to keep the matter on hold until Wednesday gives the court more time to consider the administration's request to block an injunction issued by a lower court that had concluded that federal officials likely had violated the free speech protections of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment by coercing social media platforms into censoring certain posts.
Alito's order pauses the dispute until Sept. 27 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. He had previously halted the lower court's rulingthrough Sept. 22. Alito is the justice designated by the court to act on certain matters arising from a group of states that include Louisiana, where the lawsuit was first filed.
The Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and a group of social media users sued federal officials, accusing them of unlawfully helping suppress conservative-leaning constitutionally protected speech on major social medial platforms.
Those platforms included Meta's Facebook (NASDAQ:META), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)'s YouTube and X, formerly called Twitter. Many of the posts expressed opinions that federal officials said constituted misinformation about the pandemic.
The Biden administration argued that officials did nothing illegal and had sought to mitigate the hazards of online misinformation by alerting social media companies to content that violated their own policies.
Louisiana-based U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in July
Read more on investing.com
