I am surprised this made it to SCOTUS.

You know what? Me, too!

So, let’s figure it out! And then maybe we can figure out what Justice Jackson is thinking.

Missouri and other folks are basically arguing the Biden administration unduly influenced social media companies to censor speech on covid-19, vaccine safety and efficacy, and election integrity. It’s understood that the government has an interest in providing truthful information, and it’s fine if they ask social media companies to voluntarily do various things to promote the public’s interest in truthful information. But Missouri is arguing that the Biden administration crossed that line, turning social media companies into state actors, and social media company’s censoring of speech amounts to a violation of the First Amendment. In short, the question at hand is whether social media content moderation, when requested by a government administration, constitutes a violation of speech.

Now referring to the article and what Justice Jackson asked:

“My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government in significant ways in the most important time periods,” she told the lawyer representing Louisiana, Missouri and private plaintiffs.

“And so I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information,” she continued.

“So can you help me? Because I’m really – I’m really worried about that because you’ve got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government’s perspective, and you’re saying that the government can’t interact with the source of those problems,” Jackson added.

It’s extremely unlikely she was asking a basic questions answerable by “a sophomore at Brown”. That’s an uncharitable view that assumes that she, a Supreme Court Justice, is an idiot. Instead, from my perspective, she’s asking if the defendants recognize that the government has a stake in defending the public interest. Like, if according to the defendant’s logic, if merely asking social media companies to engage in more stringent content moderation to protect the public from misinformation, without any sort of coercion or other elements that would effectively make them do it and leave the decision to social media companies to implement the government’s suggests—if the mere act of asking constitutes a violation of free speech? Are they arguing that the First Amendment hamstrings the government in every case to combat misinformation?

Naturally, conservative media takes advantage of American ignorance to flip the script from Justice Jackson attempting to illuminate the scope of the right’s conception of free speech as absolute which is evidently harmful and dangerous into a trivial question of whether it hamstrings the government.

You can find more information with reference links at my Perplexity.AI search thread.