SCOTUS decides that Fascism is good actually

In a filing on Oct. 5, the Biden administration once again urged the justices to put Doughty’s order on hold and suggested that the justices could fast-track the case for briefing and oral argument on the merits. Prelogar stressed that the court of appeals had not cited any “precedent for its conclusion that when private companies choose to request or follow advice from the government, the companies thereby become state actors” whose conduct could violate the First Amendment. And even if it is true that, as the court of appeals contended, social media companies changed their moderation policies or removed content in response to agencies like CISA, Prelogar explained, that would still not transform “the platforms’ private decisions into state action because it would not demonstrate that CISA offered the type of positive incentives that overwhelm a party’s independent judgment.”

The plaintiffs pushed back, telling the justices that the Biden administration’s “conception of state action is too narrow.” CISA, they wrote, “engaged in a relentless campaign, involving hundreds of meetings and thousands of communications, to pressure platforms to silence other peoples’ views.” In doing so, they continued, the CISA effectively controlled the platforms’ content-moderation policies “and became directly involved in hundreds of individual content-moderation decisions involving specific speakers, content, and viewpoints” – a violation of the First Amendment.