Justices on the right and left wings of the Supreme Court seemed skeptical during oral arguments on Monday about a case preventing the Biden administration from encouraging social media platforms to take down posts it considers problematic, a practice known as "jawboning."

The case came about when a federal judge issued an injunction prohibiting jawboning by Biden officials as part of an appeal of an underlying case filed by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri and social media users upset about content from COVID lockdown opponents and the Gateway Pundit website being removed.

Justice Elena Kagan pointed out that the type of communication--a request to remove problematic information--is a common one and doesn't necessarily present a problem in and of itself.

"This happens literally thousands of times a day in the federal government," she said.

More concerns

Chief Justice John Roberts said that the federal government was "not monolithic" as far as departments and agencies coordinating any efforts to punish platforms for refusing to remove posts.

"That has to dilute the concept of coercion significantly, doesn't it?" he said.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga’s argument that even just encouraging removal of information should be unlawful "would sweep in an awful lot" of routine activity.

Piggybacking on Barrett's argument, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked hypothetically if it would then be unlawful for government officials to ask a platform to take down a post that tells teens to jump out a window.

"Is it your view that the government authorities could not declare those circumstances a public emergency and encourage social media platforms to take down the information that is instigating this problem?" she said.

The real issue

The main problems the justices seemed to have with the case are that there was no alleged threat by the government if platforms refuse to take the information down and a question of whether the plaintiffs were actually harmed by the government's actions.

What's really going on here is that all of the social media platforms except X are run by liberals, who are generally more than happy to acquiesce when a liberal government official asks them to remove information the liberals find offensive.

This gives liberals a marked advantage in the information wars that are so prevalent and so crucial to prevailing narratives in today's political landscape and leads to de facto censorship of opposing conservative ideas.

Conservatives cannot win this battle in the courts, because what the liberals are doing is not really illegal, just unfair.

Unfortunately, it's hard to overcome this kind of advantage, but Republicans will probably need to find another way.