Justice Jackson's Misguided Defenestration Challenge
During the oral argument yesterday in Murthy v. Missouri , Justice Jackson repeatedly attempted to turn the focus away from the issues on which the advocates and other Justices mostly focused--whether any plaintiff has standing and whether the government's jawboning of social media companies regarding anti-vax disinformation, election denialism, and other harmful content rendered those companies' actions with respect to users "state action" subject to the First Amendment. Justice Jackson asked questions indicating she thought that the real issue was whether the government's underlying objection to the users' content was sufficiently justified. At one point, she offered the following provocative example: Suppose someone started posting about a new teen challenge that involved teens jumping out of windows at increasing elevations. This is the challenge. And kids all over the country start doing this. There's an epidemic, children are seriously injuring or ev