STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The Supreme Court says the United States government can, after all, talk to social media companies and ask them to take down offensive content. The Court heard a case by people who alleged the government pressured companies to censor themselves, which would be a violation of free speech, while the government says all they did was have a conversation. In a 6-3 vote, the court ruled the plaintiffs had no standing to sue, so the case goes away, and effectively, the government wins. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg is in our studios. Nina, good morning.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: Always good to see you. How did this ruling go?
TOTENBERG: Well, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote the decision, and she said that the lower court, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had found erroneous facts. In a rather ladylike way, she dismembered the Fifth Circuit's reasoning from A to Z. She said that the Fifth Circuit also erred by treating the government and the platforms each as a unified whole and that the plaintiffs had to demonstrate standing for each claim they press against each official who allegedly did anything bad to them. And this requires a certain threshold to show, namely, that a particular defendant - the defendant here is the official - pressured the particular platform to censor a particular topic before that platform suppressed a particular plaintiff's speech. It's a lot of particular...
INSKEEP: OK.
TOTENBERG: ...This and particular that, but the bottom line here is that she said much of the evidence is wrong.
INSKEEP: And so we have a justice from the Liberal wing, but with some Conservatives going along...
TOTENBERG: No, Conservative wing.
INSKEEP: Oh, excuse me. Amy Coney Barrett - forgive me - from the Conservative wing, leading the way and taking apart a very Conservative court's ruling on this issue that's been of great concern to Conservatives in the past. They have argued that they were censored by social media companies and argued here that the government led the way in doing that. The court says we're going to kick this aside, and we're not going to rule on the substance, and we're going to leave things stand as they are. What did the dissenters have to say about all of this?
TOTENBERG: The three dissenters were Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. And they said - Alito wrote, the court permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear and think. But, you know, this was a pretty clear statement of how hard it's going to be to bring a lawsuit against the government. I mean, one of the things that Amy Coney Barrett cited was the attempt - and she agreed, it was an aggressive attempt - to get one of the company - Twitter to take down a fake...
INSKEEP: Fake information. Yeah. Go on.
TOTENBERG: A fake entry that looked like it was Biden's daughter.
INSKEEP: Oh.
TOTENBERG: And that was false. It wasn't Biden's daughter. And they took it down subsequently. And I remember reading the record, and the guy was very mad. He said, this is not Biden's daughter. Just get rid of it. And they did. But you know what? It was a fake entry. That's the whole purpose of content moderation.
INSKEEP: Exactly. And so this gets down to the question - we have two conservative justices, one saying that the case was not proved, the other talking about government coercion, and for now, things stay as they are. Nina, thanks so much.
TOTENBERG: Thank you. And I just looked at the opinion. It was Biden's granddaughter.
INSKEEP: There we go. Thank you. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg.
TOTENBERG: Thank you.
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