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Supreme Court social media case: Court hears arguments on government ability to urge removal of online content it says spreads misinformation
Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday is hearing arguments in a case that tests how far the federal government can go in pressuring social media companies to remove content it believes spreads misinformation before it crosses a constitutional line.
The case, known as Murthy v. Missouri, arose out of efforts during the early months of the Biden administration to push social media platforms to take down posts that officials said spread falsehoods about the pandemic and the 2020 presidential election.
A U.S. district court judge said White House officials, as well as some federal agencies and their employees, violated the First Amendment’s right to free speech by “coercing” or “significantly encouraging” social media sites’ content-moderation decisions.
The legal battle is one of five that the Supreme Court is considering this term that stand at the intersection of the First Amendment’s free speech protections and social media. But it is the first of two that the justices will hear when they take the bench Monday that involves alleged jawboning, or informal pressure by the government on an intermediary to take certain actions that will suppress speech.
The second case raises whether a New York financial regulator violated the National Rifle Association’s free speech rights when she pressured banks and insurance companies in the state to sever ties with the gun rights group after the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Florida.
Decisions from the Supreme Court in both cases are expected by the end of June.
The Biden administration’s efforts to stop misinformation
The court is hearing arguments first in the case stemming from the Biden administration’s efforts to pressure platforms including Twitter, now known as X, YouTube and Facebook, to take down posts it believed spread falsehoods about the pandemic and about the last presidential election.
Brought by five social media users and two states, Louisiana and Missouri, their challenge claimed their speech was stifled when platforms removed or downgraded their posts after strong-arming by officials in the White House, Centers for Disease Control, FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
The challengers alleged that at the heart of their case is a “massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise,'” through which federal officials communicated with social media platforms with the goal of pressuring them to censor and suppress speech they disfavored.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty found that seven groups of Biden administration officials violated the First Amendment because they transformed the platforms’ content-moderation decisions into state action by “coercing” or “significantly encouraging” their activities. He limited the types of communications agencies and their employees could have with the platforms, but included several carve-outs.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit then determined that certain White House officials and the FBI violated free speech rights when they coerced and significantly encouraged platforms to suppress content related to COVID-19 vaccines and the election. It narrowed the scope of Doughty’s order but said federal employees could not “coerce or significantly encourage” a platform’s content-moderation decisions.
The justices in October agreed to decide whether the Biden administration impermissibly worked to suppress speech on Facebook, YouTube and X. The high court temporarily paused the lower court’s order limiting Biden administration officials’ contact with social media companies.
In filings with the court, the Biden administration argued that the social media users and states lack legal standing to even bring the case, but said officials must be free “to inform, to persuade, and to criticize.”
“The court imposed unprecedented limits on the ability of the president’s closest aides to speak about matters of public concern, on the FBI’s ability to address threats to the nation’s security, and on CDC’s ability to relay public-health information,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who represents the government before the Supreme Court, said.
She argued that senior Biden administration officials were using the bully pulpit to push social media companies to address false information on their platforms, which has never been a free speech violation. As long as the government is seeking to inform and persuade, and not compel, Prelogar wrote, its speech does not violate the First Amendment.
“Influence is also the natural result of successful efforts to inform, to persuade, or to criticize,” Prelogar wrote. “That the platforms often acted in response to the government’s communications thus does not remotely show that those communications were coercive.”
But state officials behind the challenge told the court that accepting the Justice Department’s argument would make the First Amendment “the easiest right to violate.”
White House officials, they said, frequently coupled private demands for social media companies to remove posts with public references to adverse consequences they could initiate, such as antitrust reforms or changes to the law that protects platforms from civil liability over content posted by third parties.
“By silencing speakers and entire viewpoints across social-media platforms, defendants systematically injure plaintiffs’ ability to participate in free online discourse,” state officials from Louisiana and Missouri wrote.
The NRA’s court fight
In the second case, the court will consider whether the former superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services violated the NRA’s free speech rights when she pushed regulated insurance companies and banks to stop doing business with the group.
Superintendent Maria Vullo, who left her post in 2019, had been investigating since 2017 two insurers involved in NRA-endorsed affinity programs, Chubb and Lockton, and determined they violated state insurance law. The investigation found that a third, Lloyd’s of London, underwrote similar unlawful insurance products for the NRA.
Then, after the Parkland shooting in February 2018, Vullo issued guidance letters that urged regulated entities “to continue evaluating and managing their risks, including reputational risks” that may arise from their dealings with the NRA or similar gun rights groups.
Later that year, the Department of Financial Services entered into consent decrees with the three insurance companies it was investigating. As part of the agreements, the insurers admitted they provided some unlawful NRA-supported programs and agreed to stop providing the policies to New York residents.
The NRA then sued the department, alleging that Vullo privately threatened insurers with enforcement action if they continued working with the group and created a system of “informal censorship” that was designed to suppress its speech, in violation of the First Amendment.
A federal district court sided with the NRA, finding that the group sufficiently alleged that Vullo’s actions “could be interpreted as a veiled threat to regulated industries to disassociate with the NRA or risk DFS enforcement action.”
But a federal appeals court disagreed and determined that the guidance letters and a press release couldn’t “reasonably be construed as being unconstitutionally threatening or coercive,” because they “were written in an even-handed, nonthreatening tone” and used words intended to persuade, not intimidate.
The NRA appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which agreed to consider whether Vullo violated the group’s free speech rights when she urged financial entities to sever their ties with it.
“Allowing unpopular speech to form the basis for adverse regulatory action under the guise of ‘reputational risk,’ as Vullo attempted here, would gut a core pillar of the First Amendment,” the group, which is represented in part by the American Civil Liberties Union, told the court in a filing.
The NRA argued that Vullo “openly targeted the NRA for its political speech and used her extensive regulatory authority over a trillion-dollar industry to pressure the institutions she oversaw into blacklisting the organization.”
“In the main, she succeeded,” the organization wrote. “But in doing so, she violated the First Amendment principle that government regulators cannot abuse their authority to target disfavored speakers for punishment.”
Vullo, though, told the court that the insurance products the NRA was offering its members were unlawful, and noted that the NRA itself signed a consent order with the department after Vullo left office after it found the group was marketing insurance producers without the proper license from the state.
“Accepting the NRA’s arguments would set an exceptionally dangerous precedent,” lawyers for the state wrote in a Supreme Court brief. “The NRA’s arguments would encourage damages suits like this one and deter public officials from enforcing the law — even against entities like the NRA that committed serious violations.”
The NRA, they claimed, is asking the Supreme Court to give it “favored status because it espouses a controversial view,” and the group has never claimed that it was unable to exercise its free speech rights.
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CIA officer who drugged, photographed and sexually assaulted dozens of women gets 30 years in prison as victims stare him down
A longtime CIA officer who drugged, photographed and sexually assaulted more than two dozen women in postings around the world was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison Wednesday after an emotional hearing in which victims described being deceived by a man who appeared kind, educated and part of an agency “that is supposed to protect the world from evil.”
Brian Jeffrey Raymond, with a graying beard and orange prison jumpsuit, sat dejectedly as he heard his punishment for one of the most egregious misconduct cases in the CIA’s history. It was chronicled in his own library of more than 500 images that showed him in some cases straddling and groping his nude, unconscious victims.
“It’s safe to say he’s a sexual predator,” U.S. Senior Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said in imposing the full sentence prosecutors had requested. “You are going to have a period of time to think about this.”
Prosecutors say the 48-year-old Raymond’s assaults date to 2006 and tracked his career in Mexico, Peru and other countries, all following a similar pattern.
He would lure women he met on Tinder and other dating apps to his government-leased apartment and drug them while serving wine and snacks. Once they were unconscious, he spent hours posing their naked bodies before photographing and assaulting them. He opened their eyelids at times and stuck his fingers in their mouths.
U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Mexico
One by one, about a dozen of Raymond’s victims who were identified only by numbers in court recounted how the longtime spy upended their lives. Some said they only learned what happened after the FBI showed them the photos of being assaulted while unconscious.
“My body looks like a corpse on his bed,” one victim said of the photos. “Now I have these nightmares of seeing myself dead.”
One described suffering a nervous breakdown. Another spoke of a recurring trance that caused her to run red lights while driving. Many told how their confidence and trust in others had been shattered forever.
“I hope he is haunted by the consequences of his actions for the rest of his life,” said one of the women, who like others stared Raymond down as they walked away from the podium.
Reading from a statement, Raymond told the judge that he has spent countless hours contemplating his “downward spiral.”
“It betrayed everything I stand for and I know no apology will ever be enough,” he said. “There are no words to describe how sorry I am. That’s not who I am and yet it’s who I became.”
In October 2021, the FBI issued a notice to the public, seeking other potential victims of and additional information about Raymond, saying that some women depicted in the incriminating photos and videos remain unidentified.
In a statement Wednesday, authorities praised all the victims who came forward.
“The FBI thanks the brave women who shared information that furthered this investigation,” said
FBI Assistant Director in Charge David Sundberg of the Washington Field Office. “We recognize our domestic and foreign law enforcement partners who helped bring Raymond to justice for his reprehensible crimes.”
Raymond’s sentencing comes amid a reckoning on sexual misconduct at the CIA. The Associated Press reported last week that another veteran CIA officer faces state charges in Virginia for allegedly reaching up a co-worker’s skirt and forcibly kissing her during a drunken party in the office.
Still another former CIA employee – an officer trainee – is scheduled to face a jury trial next month on charges he assaulted a woman with a scarf in a stairwell at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters. That case emboldened some two dozen women to come forward to authorities and Congress with accounts of their own of sexual assaults, unwanted touching and what they contend are the CIA’s efforts to silence them.
And yet the full extent of sexual misconduct at the CIA remains a classified secret in the name of national security, including a recent 648-page internal watchdog report that found systemic shortcomings in the agency’s handling of such complaints.
“The classified nature of the activities allowed the agency to hide a lot of things,” said Liza Mundy, author of “Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA.” The male-dominated agency, she said, has long been a refuge for egregious sexual misconduct. “For decades, men at the top had free rein.”
CIA has publicly condemned Raymond’s crimes and implemented sweeping reforms intended to keep women safe, streamline claims and more quickly discipline offenders.
Last year, the CIA announced the appointment of Dr. Taleeta Jackson, a seasoned psychologist who previously led the Sexual Assault Prevention Program at the U.S. Navy, as the new head of a dedicated sexual assault and prevention office at CIA.
“There is absolutely no excuse for Mr. Raymond’s reprehensible, appalling behavior,” the agency said Wednesday. “As this case shows, we are committed to engaging with law enforcement.”
But a veil of secrecy still surrounds the Raymond case nearly four years after his arrest. Even after Raymond pleaded guilty late last year, prosecutors have tiptoed around the exact nature of his work and declined to disclose a complete list of the countries where he assaulted women.
Still, they offered an unbridled account of Raymond’s conduct, describing him as a “serial offender” whose assaults increased over time and become “almost frenetic” during his final CIA posting in Mexico City, where he was discovered in 2020 after a naked woman screamed for help from his apartment balcony.
U.S. officials scoured Raymond’s electronic devices and began identifying the victims he had listed by name and physical characteristics, all of whom described experiencing some form of memory loss during their time with him.
One victim said Raymond seemed like a “perfect gentleman” when they met in Mexico in 2020, recalling only that they kissed. Unbeknownst to the woman, after she blacked out, he took 35 videos and close-up photos of her breasts and genitals.
“The defendant’s manipulation often resulted in women blaming themselves for losing consciousness, feeling ashamed, and apologizing to the defendant,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing. “He was more than willing to gaslight the women, often suggesting that the women drank too much and that, despite their instincts to the contrary, nothing had happened.”
Raymond, a San Diego native and former White House intern who is fluent in Spanish and Mandarin, ultimately pleaded guilty to four of 25 federal counts including sexual abuse, coercion and transportation of obscene material. As part of his sentence, the judge ordered him to pay $10,000 to each of his 28 victims.
Raymond’s attorneys had sought leniency, contending his “quasi-military” work at the CIA in the years following 9/11 became a breeding ground for the emotional callousness and “objectification of other people” that enabled his years of preying upon women.
“While he was working tirelessly at his government job, he ignored his own need for help, and over time he began to isolate himself, detach himself from human feelings and become emotionally numb,” defense attorney Howard Katzoff wrote in a court filing.
“He was an invaluable government worker, but it took its toll on him and sent him down a dark path.”
Bangkok — A 64-year-old woman was preparing to do her evening dishes at her home outside Bangkok when she felt a sharp pain in her thigh and looked down to see a huge python taking hold of her.
“I was about to scoop some water and when I sat down it bit me immediately,” Arom Arunroj told Thailand’s Thairath newspaper. “When I looked I saw the snake wrapping around me.”
The 13-to-16-foot-long python coiled itself around her torso, squeezing her down to the floor of her kitchen.
“I grabbed it by the head, but it wouldn’t release me,” she said. “It only tightened.”
Kunyakit Thanawtchaikun/AP
Pythons are non-venomous constrictors, which kill their prey by gradually squeezing the breath out of it.
Propped up against her kitchen door, she cried for help but it wasn’t until a neighbor happened to be walking by about an hour and a half later and heard her screams that authorities were called.
Responding police officer Anusorn Wongmalee told The Associated Press on Thursday that when he arrived the woman was still leaning against her door, looking exhausted and pale, with the snake coiled around her.
Police and animal control officers used a crowbar to hit the snake on the head until it released its grip and slithered away before it could be captured.
In all, Arom spent about two hours on Tuesday night in the clutches of the python before being freed.
She was treated for several bites but appeared to be otherwise unharmed in videos of her talking to Thai media shortly after the incident.
Encounters with snakes are not uncommon in Thailand, and last year 26 people were killed by venomous snake bites, according to government statistics. A total of 12,000 people were treated for venomous bites by snakes and other animals 2023.
The reticulated python is the largest snake found in Thailand and usually ranges in size from 5 to 21 feet, weighing up to about 165 pounds. They have been found as big as 33 feet long and 287 pounds.
Smaller pythons feed on small mammals such as rats, but larger snakes switch to prey such as pigs, deer and even domestic dogs and cats. Attacks on humans are not common, though do happen occasionally.
There have also been fatal attacks in Indonesia, where a woman was found inside the belly of a reticulated python that swallowed her whole in June — the fifth person to be devoured by one of the snakes in the country since 2017.
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After Tyre Nichols’ fatal beating, Memphis officer texted photo of bloodied man to ex-girlfriend, she testifies
A former Memphis police officer charged in the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols sent his ex-girlfriend a photo of the badly injured man on the night he was punched, kicked and hit with a police baton following a traffic stop, according to trial testimony Wednesday.
Brittany Leake, a Memphis officer and Demetrius Haley’s former girlfriend, testified during the criminal trial that she was on the phone with Haley when officers pulled Nichols over for a traffic stop. She said she heard a “commotion,” including verbal orders for someone to give officers his hands.
The call ended, but Haley later texted the photo in a group chat comprising Haley, Leake and her godsister, she testified. Prosecutors displayed the photo for the jury. It showed Nichols with his eyes closed, on the ground with what appeared to be blood near his mouth and his hands behind his back.
Leake said that when she saw the photo, her reaction was: “Oh my God, he definitely needs to go to the Med.”
The Med is shorthand for Memphis’ trauma hospital.
The fatal beating, caught on police bodycams and street surveillance cameras, has sparked protests and calls for police reform. Officers said they pulled over Nichols for reckless driving, but Memphis’ police chief said there was no evidence to substantiate that claim.
Haley, Tadarrius Bean and Justin Smith are on trial after pleading not guilty to charges that they deprived Nichols of his civil rights through excessive force and failure to intervene, and obstructed justice through witness tampering. Their trial began Sept. 9 and is expected to run three to four weeks.
George Walker IV / AP
The Memphis Police Department fired the three men, along with Emmitt Martin III and Desmond Mills Jr., after Nichols’ death. The beating was caught on police video, which was released publicly. The officers were later indicted on the federal charges. Martin and Mills have taken plea deals.
During her testimony Wednesday, Leake said she deleted the photo after she saw it and that sending such a photo is against police policy.
“I wasn’t offended, but it was difficult to look at,” she said.
Leake said Haley had sent her photos before of drugs, and of a person who had been injured in a car accident.
Earlier Wednesday, Martin was on the witness stand for a third day. Defense attorneys tried to show inconsistencies between Martin’s statements to investigators and his court testimony. Martin acknowledged lying about what happened to Memphis Police Department internal investigators, to try to cover up and “justify what I did.”
But Martin said he told the truth to FBI investigators after he pleaded guilty in August, including statements about feeling pressure on his duty belt where his gun was located during the traffic stop, but not being able to see if Nichols was trying to get his gun. Martin has testified that he said “let go of my gun” during the traffic stop.
Martin Zummach, the attorney for Justin Smith, asked Martin if he knew of any reasons why Nichols did not simply say, “I give up.”
“He’s out of it,” Martin said. “Disoriented.”
Martin testified that the situation escalated quickly when Haley pulled his gun and violently yanked Nichols from his car, using expletives and failing to tell Nichols why he had been pulled over and removed from the vehicle.
“He never got a chance to comply,” Martin said.
Nichols, who was Black, was pepper sprayed and hit with a stun gun during the traffic stop, but ran away, police video shows. The five officers, who also are Black, then beat him about a block from his home, as he called out for his mother.
Video shows the officers milling about and talking as Nichols struggled with his injuries. Nichols died Jan. 10, 2023, three days after the beating.
An autopsy report shows Nichols – the father of a boy who is now 7 – died from blows to the head. The report describes brain injuries, and cuts and bruises on his head and elsewhere on his body.
Jesse Guy testified that he was working as a paramedic for the Memphis Fire Department the night of the beating. He arrived at the location after two emergency medical technicians, Robert Long and JaMichael Sandridge.
Guy said he was not told about the medical problems Nichols had experienced before he arrived, and that Nichols was injured, seated on the ground and unresponsive.
Nichols had no pulse and was not breathing, and it “felt like he was lifeless,” Guy said.
In the ambulance, Guy performed CPR and provided mechanical ventilation, and Nichols had a pulse by the time he arrived at the hospital, the paramedic said.
Guy said Long and Sandridge did not say if they had checked Nichols’ pulse and heart rate, and they did not report if they had given him oxygen. When asked by one of Bean’s lawyers whether that information would have been helpful in treating Nichols, Guy said yes.
Long and Sandridge were fired for violating fire department policies after Nichols died. They have not been criminally charged.
The five officers also have been charged with second-degree murder in state court, where they pleaded not guilty. Mills and Martin are expected to change their pleas.
Federal prosecutors have previously recommended a 40-year sentence for Martin. A date has not been set in state court yet.
Nichols worked for FedEx, and he enjoyed skateboarding and photography. The city of Sacramento, where Nichols grew up, named a skatepark in his honor. “Tyre fell in love with skateboarding at a young age and it wasn’t long before it became a part of his lifestyle,” states the resolution approved by the city council. He had a tattoo of his mother’s name.
“Tyre Nichols’ family have been praying for justice and accountability from the very beginning of this tragedy,” Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci, the civil rights attorneys representing Nichols’ family, said in a statement when the trial began.
CIA officer who drugged, photographed and sexually assaulted dozens of women gets 30 years in prison as victims stare him down
Python squeezes Thai woman in her kitchen for 2 hours before she’s rescued by police
After Tyre Nichols’ fatal beating, Memphis officer texted photo of bloodied man to ex-girlfriend, she testifies
CIA officer who drugged, photographed and sexually assaulted dozens of women gets 30 years in prison as victims stare him down
Python squeezes Thai woman in her kitchen for 2 hours before she’s rescued by police