Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Biden Administration’s Contacts With Social Media Companies

The Supreme Court handed the Biden administration a major practical victory on Wednesday, rejecting a challenge to its contacts with social media platforms to combat what administration officials said was misinformation.

The court ruled that the states and users who had challenged the contacts had not suffered the sort of direct injury that gave them standing to sue.

The decision, by a 6 to 3 vote, left fundamental legal questions for another day.

“The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the yearslong communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different topics,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority. “This court’s standing doctrine prevents us from exercising such general legal oversight of the other branches of government.”