The Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a case brought by the Children’s Health Defense group accusing Meta of violating the First Amendment when it censored information from the group on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic.
CHD, which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. led for years, alleged that Meta colluded with the Biden administration to trample First Amendment rights by restricting content the group posted about the COVID-19 vaccines on Facebook and Instagram.
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However, the Supreme Court declined without comment to hear CHD’s effort to appeal a 2024 California court decision that the group did not provide sufficient evidence that Meta worked with or was coerced by Biden officials to suppress views challenging “government orthodoxy” on vaccines.
The court battle began when CHD first announced a lawsuit against Meta in 2020. At the time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an initiative to crack down on “misinformation,” including banning ads on Facebook and Instagram that discouraged people from vaccinating.
“We don’t want these ads on our platform,” Facebook officials Kang-Xing Jin and Rob Leathern said in a blog post. “Our goal is to help messages about the safety and efficacy of vaccines reach a broad group of people, while prohibiting ads with misinformation that could harm public health efforts.”
In 2022, CHD revealed it was completely “deplatformed” from Facebook and Instagram without warning,” sharing screenshots that it was removed from the social media sites due to Meta’s claims that the group “repeatedly” violated the company’s policies by spreading “false information about COVID-19.” CHD opposed COVID-19 vaccine mandates and questioned Biden health officials who assured the public that the vaccines were safe and effective.
Kennedy, CHD’s chairman and chief legal counsel at the time, weighed in on the matter, arguing that Facebook “is acting here as a surrogate for the federal government’s crusade to silence all criticism of draconian government policies.”
“Our constitutional framers recognized this peril of government censorship,” he said. “We don’t need the First Amendment to protect popular or government-approved speech. They incorporated the First Amendment specifically to protect free expression of dissenting opinions. They understood that a government that can silence its critics has a license for every atrocity.”
However, California’s 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August 2024 that CHD did not provide credible proof that Meta behaved like a “state actor.” The court found that Meta’s content moderation policies were independently developed and not compelled by federal law.
Six months later, Zuckerberg overhauled Meta’s “fact-checking” program, announcing the company would move toward “restoring free expression on our platforms.” The same month, he accused Biden officials of pressuring his company to censor information regarding COVID-19 vaccine side effects during the pandemic, saying they would call Meta employees and “scream at them and curse.”
“While they were trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who was basically arguing against it,” Zuckerberg said during an appearance with podcaster Joe Rogan. “They pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly true.”
The Meta CEO’s comments came after he first accused the Biden administration of “pressuring” Meta into “censoring” COVID-19-related information on its social media platforms in August 2024.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg said in a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH).
“I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” he added. “We’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
CHD’s failure to secure Supreme Court scrutiny into Meta on Monday comes after it faced another legal setback last November, when it was denied an emergency appeal to protect physicians’ right to question the “mainstream COVID narrative.”
CHD lawyers said the plaintiffs, two doctors from Washington, faced prosecution after “writing opinion articles in which they did not endorse the official COVID-19 narrative and offered their opinions about effective medical treatment and prevention.”