But they are saying they don’t have standing because they haven’t demonstrated the causal relationship to the harm from the government communications.
My understanding of what the Court said is that the plaintiffs incorrectly asserted that all censorship by the social media companies was as a result of government prodding or orders. As I said earlier, it is ridiculous to assume that all of the censorship came about because of government pressure. These are leftist-controlled companies, and they are not stupid people (misguided or evil is another matter). They clearly understand that certain posts would harm their political cause, so they censored some of them completely on their own. Our side was stupid enough to argue that it all came from government pressure of one kind or another.
Held: Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant.
....because the plaintiffs request forward-looking relief, they must face “a real and immediate threat of repeated injury.” O’Shea v. Littleton, 414 U. S. 488, 496. Putting these requirements together, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, at least one platform will restrict the speech of at least one plaintiff in response to the actions of at least one Government defendant. Here, at the preliminary injunction stage, they must show that they are likely to succeed in carrying that burden. On the record in this case, that is a tall order.
...(1) The Court first considers whether the plaintiffs have demonstrated traceability for their past injuries. Because the plaintiffs are seeking only forward-looking relief, the past injuries are relevant only for their predictive value. The primary weakness in the record of past restrictions is the lack of specific causation findings with respect to any discrete instance of content moderation. And while the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices, the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment. The Fifth Circuit, by attributing every platform decision at least in part to the defendants, glossed over complexities in the evidence.
(3) To obtain forward-looking relief, the plaintiffs must establish a substantial risk of future injury that is traceable to the Government defendants and likely to be redressed by an injunction against them. The plaintiffs who have not pointed to any past restrictions likely traceable to the Government defendants (i.e., everyone other than Hines) are ill suited to the task of establishing their standing to seek forward-looking relief. But even Hines, with her superior showing on past harm, has not shown enough to demonstrate likely future harm at the hands of these defendants. On this record, it appears that the frequent, intense communications that took place in 2021 between the Government defendants and the platforms had considerably subsided by 2022, when Hines filed suit. Thus it is “no more than conjecture” to assume that Hines will be subject to Government-induced content moderation. Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U. S. 95, 108.
As an aside, it is my considered belief that the cure for social media companies censoring posts is to make them adhere to Rule 230. What this means is that if they filter out posts that are not related to advocating violence, that means they are exercising editorial control, and they are thus liable to be sued by individuals, groups or the government. On the other hand, if they don’t censor posts, other than ones dealing with advocating violence, then they are not exercising editorial control, they are just providing a new form of the Public Square, and they cannot be sued by anybody for the opinions expressed on their websites by others. The problem here is that our government, which promulgated Rule 230, has not been enforcing it. There is one way to make that change, and then involves getting the current corrupt leftist administration tossed out on its ass this November.