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Comment by lesuorac | Hacker News Reader

Except they did. This ruling removes the injection prohibiting the USG from talking to social media companies.

This detail is in the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri

It's not a "ruling", it's a "refusal to hear the case", which effectively removes the injunction. They made no comment on the legality of the administration's actions.

Edit: jfc, lol @ the debate around whether or not to call it a "ruling". The government can continue to talk to social media companies for now regardless of whatever the hell you call it. I regret contributing to this lol.

> 83 F. 4th 350, reversed and remanded.

Is a ruling. It reverses the decision in "83 F. 4th 350" also known as Murthy v Missouri [1].

[1]: https://casetext.com/case/murthy-v-missouri-3

It indeed is a ruling, but it's not a ruling that "US Government Can Continue Talking to Social Media Companies." It's a ruling that this specific case cannot be heard as presented.

It’s a ruling against the injunction, not a ruling on the merits of the case.

And the injunction prohibited the USG from talking to Social Medial Companies.

This ruling removes the injunction,

Therefore, SCOTUS rules that USG can talk to Social Media Companies.

That's not how lawyers think about this, and since this is a legal case, if they don't, neither should the rest of us.

We're talking about the headline of a news article. The standard shouldn't be what would a lawyer claim.

I would claim a lay-person would say that removing a limitation from doing X could be stated as allowing X.

The WSJ's headline is much better and not misleading: "Supreme Court Rejects GOP-Led Suit Claiming Government Censored Social Media".

And it propagates all the way back down the stack (so to speak), meaning, the lower courts have to also refuse to hear the case. It doesn't mean they can't hear future cases where standing is clearly established.

They established an unreasonable standard for standing that doesn't match previous cases. There won't be future cases where standing is established, by this standard.

All published Supreme Court cases establish precedent. What are you talking about?

It removes the injunction because they determined there wasn't standing, not because they affirmed the Executive's actions as legal. Those are two different things.

There could be no clearer standing than this case, consisting of several users who had their opinions censored and attorneys general representing the rights of the people. If neither group has standing, who does?

This was a base act of legal buffoonery. It is transparently bullshit.

Facebook or Twitter would have had standing, if they claimed injury due to perceived Government threats in reaction to their speech.

Did you read the whole opinion? It's pretty coherent, and makes sense if you've ever taken a civil procedure course.

The lack of standing comes from the failure of the plaintiffs to mention specific actions.

You can't just be like "FaceBook censored me because of the FBI". You have to actually make a claim like "My post from July 5th was removed by FaceBook because of an email written to FaceBook from the FBI on July 6th". Preferably with both the email and post as exhibits.

Well, that's not quite true. You can claim that you have been dissuaded from exercising your First Amendment rights[1] in the future (for example, that you're afraid of publishing new material under threat of punishment). That's called a "chilling effect." The problem in this case is that no plaintiff could do even that and draw a plausible and clear causal connection between their fear and the actions of the Government.

[1] The question of whether someone has a First Amendment right to make a social media post has not yet been clearly established, and the Court didn't get to this question in this case.

That allows the government to censor at will by censoring on the policy level, by making Facebook adopt government-demanded policies. Since it is always possible that Facebook could have come up with the same policy anyway by coincidence, it's never possible to trace any specific act to the government censorship.

Of course it’s possible. That’s what discovery is for. Internal emails were cited in this case as well.

And if the Government had coerced Facebook in violation of its Constitutional rights, I’m sure Facebook would sue the Government and quite possibly prevail.

Precisely. What some people want is for some judicial process to interpose itself in collusion between a private company and the government against the interests of individual clients of a private company... That if the Executive says "jump" and a private company says "how high?" in violation of no particular statute, the judiciary would stop them for First Amendment reasons.

It won't, because the companies don't own a private citizen's First Amendment right.

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