White House officials repeatedly pressed Facebook and Twitter to remove posts
Internal emails obtained through discovery in Missouri v. Biden (later Murthy v. Missouri) showed White House officials, including then-Deputy Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, repeatedly pressed Facebook and Twitter to remove or suppress specific posts between 2021 and 2022, including a March 2021 email to a Facebook executive titled "You are hiding the ball" over the platform's handling of anti-vaccine content. On June 26, 2024, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs — Missouri, Louisiana, and several individual social-media users, represented as defendant U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy — lacked standing to seek an injunction, because they could not trace their specific past or future harms directly enough to the government's conduct. The Court did not decide whether the pressure campaign itself violated the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court sidestepped a ruling on whether the Biden administration's communications with social media platforms amounted to unconstitutional coercion, dismissing the case for lack of standing.
To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek.
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The parties in Murthy v. Missouri (Missouri v. Biden) settled on March 23, 2026 through a consent decree barring the Surgeon General, CDC and CISA from threatening platforms to suppress the plaintiffs' protected speech; the decree states it is not an admission of the plaintiffs' allegations. Source ↗