The Supreme Court seemed prepared Monday to reject a Republican-led effort to sharply limit the federal government from pressuring social media companies to remove harmful posts and misinformation from their platforms.
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Supreme Court likely to reject limits on White House social media contacts
A majority of justices from across the ideological spectrum expressed concern about hamstringing White House officials and other federal employees from communicating with tech giants about posts the government deems problematic that are related to public health, national security and elections, among other topics.
The case involves a lawsuit initiated by two Republican-led states — Missouri and Louisiana — and individual social media users. They accuse the Biden administration of violating the First Amendment by operating a sprawling federal “censorship enterprise” to influence platforms to modify or take down posts.
Justices Elena Kagan and Brett M. Kavanaugh, who previously worked as lawyers in Democratic and Republican administrations, respectively, suggested that government exchanges with the platforms and media outlets were routine occurrences and did not amount to censorship or coercion in violation of the constitutional right to free speech.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. seemed to agree, noting that the federal government has numerous agencies that do not always speak with a single voice.
“It’s not monolithic,” he said in an exchange with the attorney representing Louisiana. “That has to dilute the concept of coercion significantly. Doesn’t it?”
The case gives the Supreme Court an opportunity to shape how government officials interact with social media companies and communicate with the public online at a time when such platforms play an increasingly important role in elections and public debate. The justices are reviewing a lower-court ruling that sharply limited such interactions, and they must clarify when government attempts to combat misinformation cross the line from permissible persuasion to unconstitutional coercion.
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The dispute is one of several before the justices this term testing Republican-backed claims that social media companies are working with Democratic allies to silence conservative voices online. The outcome could have sweeping implications for the U.S. government’s efforts to combat foreign disinformation during a critical election year when nearly half of the world’s population will go to the polls.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned during a meeting in Seoul on Monday of a “flood of falsehoods that suffocate serious civic debate.” Social media and artificial intelligence, he said, “created an accelerant for disinformation.”
The high court on Monday appeared ready to embrace a narrow ruling, with several justices suggesting that the states and individuals behind the lawsuit did not have sufficient legal grounds to sue the Biden administration. Some said the individuals could not show a direct link between the government’s pressure on the platforms and the tech companies’ removal of posts that the government deemed problematic.
Kagan pressed Louisiana’s lawyer for evidence that the government — not the social media companies — was responsible for taking down the posts at issue: “How do you decide that it’s government action as opposed to platform action?”
The First Amendment prevents the government from censoring speech and punishing people for expressing different views. But the Biden administration says officials are entitled to share information, participate in public debate and urge action, as long as their requests are not accompanied by threats.
Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher, representing the Biden administration, said government officials have long-standing authority to use the bully pulpit to inform and persuade. The lower-court ruling, he said, would prevent thousands of government officials, including FBI agents and presidential aides, from addressing threats to national security and public health.
The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana argued that the federal government went too far by coercing social media companies to suppress speech of individual users and by becoming deeply involved in the companies’ decisions to remove certain content. Tech companies, they said, cannot act on behalf of the government to remove speech the government doesn’t like.
Louisiana Solicitor General J. Benjamin Aguiñaga said the Biden administration had subjected the platforms to unrelenting pressure, using profanity and badgering — not the bully pulpit. “That’s just being a bully,” he told the court.
The record before the Supreme Court includes email messages between Biden administration officials and social media companies, including Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Twitter, showing tense conversations in 2021 as the White House and public health officials campaigned for Americans to get the coronavirus vaccine. Several justices pushed back Monday on the states’ characterizations of those messages and pointed out inaccuracies in their filings.
“I have such a problem with your brief, counselor,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. “You omit information that changes the context of some of your claims. You attribute things to people who it didn’t happen to.”
Aguiñaga apologized and took responsibility “if any aspect of our brief was not as forthcoming as it should have been.”
The toughest questions for the Biden administration came from conservative Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas, who, along with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, dissented earlier this term when the majority temporarily blocked the lower-court ruling allowing contacts with social media companies to continue.
Alito said the intense back-and-forth and constant demands from the Biden administration at the height of the vaccination campaign in 2021 suggested the government was impermissibly coordinating with, and coercing, social media companies.
The administration was “treating Facebook and these other platforms like they’re subordinates,” he said, noting that he could not imagine government officials making similar demands of news outlets.
“Do you think that the print media regards themselves as being on the same team as the federal government, partners with the federal government?” Alito asked the government’s lawyer, pointing to the dozens of journalists sitting inside the courtroom.
Gorsuch asked Fletcher whether accusing a company of “killing people” crossed the line into coercion. The question referred to President Biden’s response in July 2021 to questions about how Facebook and other tech platforms were handling misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine.
Fletcher said Biden’s statement was “off the cuff” and meant as an “exhortation, not a threat.” Biden clarified three days later that he was referring to the people spreading misinformation, not the platforms, the attorney said.
Kavanaugh, who worked in the George W. Bush White House, said it’s not uncommon for government officials to warn media companies that articles about surveillance or other military policies could harm war efforts and put Americans at risk.
The initial ruling in the lawsuit came from a conservative district court judge in Louisiana who said that the Biden administration appeared to have operated “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The court’s order barred thousands of federal employees from improperly influencing tech companies to remove certain content.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit narrowed the decision to a smaller set of government officials and agencies, including the surgeon general’s office, the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FBI. A three-judge panel of the appeals court said the White House probably “coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences.” The panel also found that the White House “significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, both in violation of the First Amendment.”
In October, the Supreme Court intervened and allowed the Biden administration to resume communications with social media companies while the litigation continued. Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch dissented, saying that “government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government.”
Separate from the lawsuit, House Republicans are investigating how tech companies handle requests from Biden administration officials and demanding thousands of documents from internet platforms. Conservative activists have also filed lawsuits and records requests for private correspondence between tech companies and academic researchers studying election- and health-related conspiracies.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who has led the probe of the tech industry and supported the lawsuit by the Republican attorneys general against the Biden administration, attended the argument Monday.
The justices are also set to decide this term whether state laws passed in Texas and Florida can prohibit social media companies from removing certain political posts. The court is expected to reach a decision in those cases, as well as the case involving the Biden administration, by the end of its term, probably in June or early July.
Until then, tech companies probably will not make major changes to their programs to counter disinformation, even as the U.S. presidential election approaches, said David Greene, the civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The cases, Greene said, “leave the platforms in a position of great uncertainty.”
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Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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