SCOTUS allows Biden admin to contact social media firms about misinfo for now

• The new stay will allow federal agencies to again contact social media companies, including Facebook, YouTube and the company formally known as Twitter, about potentially harmful content.

Catch up quick: The Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri sued the administration last year, claiming it had violated the First Amendment by encouraging social media platforms to remove or dampen false content on issues like the COVID-19 pandemic or the integrity of elections.

• The Biden administration has maintained that it discouraged certain false content for the sake of public health and safety.
• The injunction issued by a federal judge earlier this year prevented several agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI, from making requests to platforms.
• An appeals court later limited the scope of the injunction but also ruled that some federal agencies likely did violate the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court previously stayed the order in September, but that pause expired just days later.

• The restrictions will now remain suspended until the court issues a judgment, though it did not say when it would hear oral arguments.

Of note: Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, dissented.

• Alito wrote he believes the pause "will be seen by some as giving the Government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news."

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Read the filing: