RFK Jr’s Social Media Case Against Biden Rejected By the Supreme Court

AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee

The Supreme Court denied a request by independent presidential candidate and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to intervene in a case involving social media censorship.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Kennedy has claimed that he was being censored on social media not by private companies, but by the federal government, saying that they were engaging in “online suppression of facts and opinions” in a lawsuit. Kennedy’s Instagram account was banned by the platform in February 2021 citing Kennedy’s “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” a spokesman from Facebook (before it became Meta) told the Associated Press at the time.

Kennedy sought to join in a lawsuit with attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana that blamed the administration of President Joe Biden for the censorship of conservatives while government officials were trying to work with social media companies to combat disinformation about elections and the pandemic. Seeing an opportunity to make his own arguments against government censorship, Kennedy filed a motion to intervene in the case, Murthy v. Missouri, which SCOTUS agreed in October to bring before the court.

But SCOTUS denied the motion with no public explanation, with only Justice Samuel Alito dissenting. He wrote:

Our democratic form of government is undermined if Government officials prevent a candidate for high office from communicating with voters, and such efforts are especially dangerous when the officials engaging in such conduct are answerable to a rival candidate. I would allow him to intervene to ensure that we can reach the merits of respondents’ claims and to prevent the irreparable loss of his First Amendment rights.

Alito is referring to Biden, whom Kennedy is also technically suing in addition to campaigning against.