Missouri v. Biden: Censorship Claims, Standing, and Settlement

Missouri v. Biden was a First Amendment lawsuit accusing federal officials of coercing social media companies into suppressing disfavored speech about COVID-19, elections, and the Hunter Biden laptop story. The Supreme Court, which renamed the case Murthy v. Missouri, ruled 6–3 on June 26, 2024 that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue, vacating the injunctions the lower courts had issued without deciding whether the government’s conduct was unconstitutional.¹ The case then settled in March 2026 under a 10-year court-enforceable injunction barring three federal agencies from threatening platforms into censoring protected speech.²

Who Sued and What They Alleged

The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed the case in May 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana. Five individuals joined as plaintiffs: epidemiologists Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff (co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration), Jill Hines of Health Freedom Louisiana, Jim Hoft of the Gateway Pundit, and medical ethics professor Aaron Kheriaty. They sued dozens of executive branch officials and agencies, including the White House, the Office of the Surgeon General, the FBI, the CDC, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).¹

Their theory centered on “jawboning,” the practice of officials pressuring private companies to change their behavior without any law or formal regulation. Casual communication between government and business is common and legal. The constitutional problem arises when persuasion becomes coercion, and a private company’s editorial decisions stop being its own because it fears regulatory retaliation. The plaintiffs argued that when that line is crossed, the platform’s decisions become government action subject to First Amendment limits.

What Speech Was Allegedly Suppressed

COVID-19 content dominated the complaint. Posts questioning the origins of the virus, the effectiveness of lockdowns, and vaccine efficacy were flagged, demoted, or removed. The Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for focused protection rather than broad lockdowns, was a flashpoint, with its authors reporting sharply reduced reach on major platforms.

Election-related content was the second major category. During the 2020 cycle, CISA coordinated with platforms on election misinformation, sharing intelligence and requesting takedowns of accounts that repeatedly spread false election information. The agency later confirmed it stopped communicating with platforms about election-specific matters after July 2023.

The Hunter Biden laptop story became one of the most politically charged examples. When the New York Post published the story on October 14, 2020, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force attended a meeting with Facebook. A Facebook employee asked whether the laptop was authentic, and the FBI’s section chief responded with “no comment,” despite internal knowledge that the laptop was real and not Russian disinformation. Facebook then reduced the story’s visibility in users’ newsfeeds.³

How the Lower Courts Ruled

On July 4, 2023, Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana issued a sweeping preliminary injunction siding with the plaintiffs. He wrote that during the pandemic “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.'”⁴ The order prohibited a wide range of agencies and officials from contacting social media companies to urge, encourage, or pressure the removal of protected speech.

The Fifth Circuit reviewed the injunction in October 2023 and agreed that certain officials had likely crossed the constitutional line, but found the district court’s order too broad. It affirmed the injunction as to the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, the FBI, and CISA, and reversed as to all other defendants.⁵ The appellate court pointed to messages from White House officials telling platforms that “last time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection” and warning that the administration was “internally considering options.” Those, the court concluded, carried an implicit threat of regulatory retaliation.

The Supreme Court’s Standing Ruling

The Supreme Court granted certiorari, renamed the case Murthy v. Missouri, and issued its decision on June 26, 2024. Justice Barrett wrote for a majority that included Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Jackson. The Court vacated the injunctions in full, but the ruling was procedural rather than substantive: it held the plaintiffs had never established standing to sue.¹

Standing requires that a plaintiff’s injury be “fairly traceable” to a defendant’s conduct. Justice Barrett held that the plaintiffs needed to make a “threshold showing that a particular defendant pressured a particular platform to censor a particular topic before that platform suppressed a particular plaintiff’s speech on that topic.” The record, she wrote, did not support that chain.¹

The majority pointed to three problems with the evidence. The platforms had their own content moderation policies and had strengthened them before the government’s communications began; Facebook expanded its COVID-19 misinformation rules in early February 2021, before the White House started reaching out. The platforms regularly pushed back, declining to remove flagged content that did not violate their own policies. And the platforms consulted outside experts alongside government officials, making it impossible to attribute any specific moderation decision to government pressure alone. Justice Barrett also emphasized that “standing is not dispensed in gross”: each plaintiff had to show injury from each defendant for each form of relief, a step the lower courts had skipped.

Justice Alito’s Dissent

Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, dissented sharply. He argued the majority had applied a “new and heightened standard” for standing and focused on plaintiff Jill Hines, whose COVID-related Facebook posts and groups were repeatedly restricted during the period of heaviest government pressure. Because the White House had prompted Facebook to change its policies, Alito wrote, her injuries were traceable to government conduct and could be remedied by an injunction.¹

On the merits, Alito called the government’s conduct a “far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign” that was “blatantly unconstitutional.” He warned that the majority’s approach “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.”

The 2026 Settlement

The Supreme Court’s decision vacated the injunctions and sent the case back for dismissal, but the litigation did not end there. On March 25, 2026, the Department of Justice under the Trump administration announced a settlement.²

The settlement implements President Trump’s January 2025 executive order “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” which stated that the prior administration had “trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies.” Under the terms, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and CISA are subject to a 10-year, court-enforceable injunction that bars them from threatening major social media platforms with legal, regulatory, or economic punishment to induce the removal or suppression of the plaintiffs’ protected speech. The settlement also prevents those three agencies from interfering with how platforms make content moderation decisions.² The reach is narrower than the district court’s original order, which had covered a longer list of agencies, but the settlement carries the force of a court order for a full decade.

What the Case Left Unresolved

Because the Supreme Court decided on standing, it never reached the constitutional question at the heart of the case: where the line falls between the government persuading a private company and coercing one. The Fifth Circuit had proposed a four-factor test looking at word choice and tone, whether the recipient perceived a threat, whether the speaker held regulatory authority, and whether the communication referenced adverse consequences, with the last factor weighing most heavily.⁵ A related decision from the same term, NRA v. Vullo, identified three leading factors for evaluating coercion: the authority of the officials involved, the nature of their statements, and the reaction of the pressured party.⁶ Neither framework became binding Supreme Court precedent in the jawboning context through this case.

The 2026 settlement restrains three named agencies for ten years, but the broader question of when informal government pressure on private speech crosses into unconstitutional coercion is still open, waiting for a future case with plaintiffs who can clear the standing bar the Court set in Murthy.

1
Supreme Court of the United States. Murthy v. Missouri
2
United States Department of Justice. Justice Department Settles Lawsuits Challenging Biden Administration’s Alleged Social Media Coercion and Censorship
3
House Judiciary Committee Republicans. Testimony Reveals FBI Employees Who Warned Social Media Companies about Hack and Leak Operation Knew Hunter Biden Laptop Wasn’t Russian Disinformation
4
Missouri Attorney General. Missouri v. Biden – Preliminary Injunction Ruling
5
Justia. State of Missouri v. Biden, No. 23-30445 (5th Cir. 2023)
6
Congressional Research Service. Government Coercion of Private Speech: National Rifle Association v. Vullo