(Slip Opinion)              OCTOBER TERM, 2023                                       1

                                       Syllabus

         NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is
       being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued.
       The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been
       prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader.
       See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 

.


SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

                                       Syllabus

  MURTHY, SURGEON GENERAL, ET AL. v. MISSOURI
                   ET AL.

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR
                  THE FIFTH CIRCUIT

      No. 23–411.      Argued March 18, 2024—Decided June 26, 2024
Under their longstanding content-moderation policies, social-media plat-
 forms have taken a range of actions to suppress certain categories of
 speech, including speech they judge to be false or misleading. In 2020,
 with the outbreak of COVID–19, the platforms announced that they
 would enforce these policies against users who post false or misleading
 content about the pandemic. The platforms also applied misinfor-
 mation policies during the 2020 election season. During that period,
 various federal officials regularly spoke with the platforms about
 COVID–19 and election-related misinformation. For example, White
 House officials publicly and privately called on the platforms to do
 more to address vaccine misinformation. Surgeon General Vivek
 Murthy issued a health advisory that encouraged the platforms to take
 steps to prevent COVID–19 misinformation “from taking hold.” The
 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alerted the platforms to
 COVID–19 misinformation trends and flagged example posts. The
 Federal Bureau of Investigation and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
 Security Agency communicated with the platforms about election-re-
 lated misinformation in advance of the 2020 Presidential election and
 the 2022 midterms.
    Respondents are two States and five individual social-media users
 who sued dozens of Executive Branch officials and agencies, alleging
 that the Government pressured the platforms to censor their speech in
 violation of the First Amendment. Following extensive discovery, the
 District Court issued a preliminary injunction. The Fifth Circuit af-
 firmed in part and reversed in part. The court held that both the state
 plaintiffs and the individual plaintiffs had Article III standing to seek
 injunctive relief. On the merits, the court held that the Government
2                          MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                                   Syllabus

    entities and officials, by “coerc[ing]” or “significantly encourag[ing]”
    the platforms’ moderation decisions, transformed those decisions into
    state action. The court then modified the District Court’s injunction
    to state that the defendants shall not coerce or significantly encourage
    social-media companies to suppress protected speech on their plat-
    forms.
Held: Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Ar-
 ticle III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant. Pp. 8–
 29.
       (a) Article III’s “case or controversy” requirement is “fundamental”
    to the “proper role” of the Judiciary. Raines v. Byrd, 

. A proper case or controversy exists only when at least one plain-
    tiff “establish[es] that [she] ha[s] standing to sue,” ibid.—i.e., that she
    has suffered, or will suffer, an injury that is “concrete, particularized,
    and actual or imminent; fairly traceable to the challenged action; and
    redressable by a favorable ruling,” Clapper v. Amnesty Int’l USA, 

. Here, the plaintiffs’ theories of standing depend on the
    platforms’ actions—yet the plaintiffs do not seek to enjoin the plat-
    forms from restricting any posts or accounts. Instead, they seek to
    enjoin the Government agencies and officials from pressuring or en-
    couraging the platforms to suppress protected speech in the future.
       The one-step-removed, anticipatory nature of the plaintiffs’ alleged
    injuries presents two particular challenges. First, it is a bedrock prin-
    ciple that a federal court cannot redress “injury that results from the
    independent action of some third party not before the court.” Simon
    v. Eastern Ky. Welfare Rights Organization, 

, 41–42. Sec-
    ond, because the plaintiffs request forward-looking relief, they must
    face “a real and immediate threat of repeated injury.” O’Shea v. Lit-
    tleton, 

. Putting these requirements together, the
    plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, at least
    one platform will restrict the speech of at least one plaintiff in response
    to the actions of at least one Government defendant. Here, at the pre-
    liminary injunction stage, they must show that they are likely to suc-
    ceed in carrying that burden. On the record in this case, that is a tall
    order. Pp. 8–10.
       (b) The plaintiffs’ primary theory of standing involves their “direct
    censorship injuries.” Pp. 10–26.
          (1) The Court first considers whether the plaintiffs have demon-
    strated traceability for their past injuries. Because the plaintiffs are
    seeking only forward-looking relief, the past injuries are relevant only
    for their predictive value. The primary weakness in the record of past
    restrictions is the lack of specific causation findings with respect to any
    discrete instance of content moderation. And while the record reflects
    that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the
                    Cite as: 

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                                Syllabus

platforms’ moderation choices, the evidence indicates that the plat-
forms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exer-
cised their own judgment. The Fifth Circuit, by attributing every plat-
form decision at least in part to the defendants, glossed over
complexities in the evidence. The Fifth Circuit also erred by treating
the defendants, plaintiffs, and platforms each as a unified whole. Be-
cause “standing is not dispensed in gross,” TransUnion LLC v.
Ramirez, 

, “plaintiffs must demonstrate standing for
each claim they press” against each defendant, “and for each form of
relief they seek,” 

 This requires a threshold showing that a par-
ticular defendant pressured a particular platform to censor a particu-
lar topic before that platform suppressed a particular plaintiff’s speech
on that topic. Complicating the plaintiffs’ effort to demonstrate that
each platform acted due to Government coercion, rather than its own
judgment, is the fact that the platforms began to suppress the plain-
tiffs’ COVID–19 content before the defendants’ challenged communi-
cations started. Pp. 10–14.
      (2) The plaintiffs fail, by and large, to link their past social-media
restrictions and the defendants’ communications with the platforms.
The state plaintiffs, Louisiana and Missouri, refer only to action taken
by Facebook against a Louisiana state representative’s post about chil-
dren and the COVID–19 vaccine. But they never say when Facebook
took action against the official’s post—a critical fact in establishing a
causal link. Nor have the three plaintiff doctors established a likeli-
hood that their past restrictions are traceable to either the White
House officials or the CDC. They highlight restrictions imposed by
Twitter and LinkedIn, but point only to Facebook’s communications
with White House officials. Plaintiff Jim Hoft, who runs a news web-
site, experienced election-related restrictions on various platforms. He
points to the FBI’s role in the platforms’ adoption of hacked-material
policies and claims that Twitter restricted his content pursuant to
those policies. Yet Hoft’s declaration reveals that Twitter took action
according to its own rules against posting private, intimate media
without consent. Hoft does not provide evidence that his past injuries
are likely traceable to the FBI or CISA. Plaintiff Jill Hines, a
healthcare activist, faced COVID–19-related restrictions on Facebook.
Though she makes the best showing of all the plaintiffs, most of the
lines she draws are tenuous. Plus, Facebook started targeting her con-
tent before almost all of its communications with the White House and
the CDC, thus weakening the inference that her subsequent re-
strictions are likely traceable to Government-coerced enforcement of
Facebook’s policies. Even assuming Hines can eke out a showing of
traceability, the past is relevant only insofar as it predicts the future.
Pp. 14–21.
4                         MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                                  Syllabus

          (3) To obtain forward-looking relief, the plaintiffs must establish
    a substantial risk of future injury that is traceable to the Government
    defendants and likely to be redressed by an injunction against them.
    The plaintiffs who have not pointed to any past restrictions likely
    traceable to the Government defendants (i.e., everyone other than
    Hines) are ill suited to the task of establishing their standing to seek
    forward-looking relief. But even Hines, with her superior showing on
    past harm, has not shown enough to demonstrate likely future harm
    at the hands of these defendants. On this record, it appears that the
    frequent, intense communications that took place in 2021 between the
    Government defendants and the platforms had considerably subsided
    by 2022, when Hines filed suit. Thus it is “no more than conjecture”
    to assume that Hines will be subject to Government-induced content
    moderation. Los Angeles v. Lyons, 

.
       The plaintiffs’ counterarguments are unpersuasive. First, they ar-
    gue that they suffer “continuing, present adverse effects” from their
    past restrictions, as they must now self-censor on social media.
    O’Shea, 

. But the plaintiffs “cannot manufacture
    standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves based on their fears
    of hypothetical future harm that is not certainly impending.” Clapper,
    

. Second, the plaintiffs suggest that the platforms
    continue to suppress their speech according to policies initially
    adopted under Government pressure. But the plaintiffs have a re-
    dressability problem. Without evidence of continued pressure from the
    defendants, the platforms remain free to enforce, or not to enforce,
    their policies—even those tainted by initial governmental coercion.
    And the available evidence indicates that the platforms have contin-
    ued to enforce their policies against COVID–19 misinformation even
    as the Federal Government has wound down its own pandemic re-
    sponse measures. Enjoining the Government defendants, therefore, is
    unlikely to affect the platforms’ content-moderation decisions. Pp. 21–
    27.
       (c) The plaintiffs next assert a “right to listen” theory of standing.
    The individual plaintiffs argue that the First Amendment protects
    their interest in reading and engaging with the content of other speak-
    ers on social media. This theory is startlingly broad, as it would grant
    all social-media users the right to sue over someone else’s censorship—
    at least so long as they claim an interest in that person’s speech. While
    the Court has recognized a “First Amendment right to receive infor-
    mation and ideas,” the Court has identified a cognizable injury only
    where the listener has a concrete, specific connection to the speaker.
    Kleindienst v. Mandel, 

. Attempting to satisfy this
    requirement, the plaintiffs emphasize that hearing unfettered speech
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                                Syllabus

  on social media is critical to their work as scientists, pundits, and ac-
  tivists. But they do not point to any specific instance of content mod-
  eration that caused them identifiable harm. They have therefore
  failed to establish an injury that is sufficiently “concrete and particu-
  larized.” Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 

. The state
  plaintiffs assert a sovereign interest in hearing from their citizens on
  social media, but they have not identified any specific speakers or top-
  ics that they have been unable to hear or follow. And States do not
  have third-party “standing as parens patriae to bring an action against
  the Federal Government” on behalf of their citizens who have faced
  social-media restrictions. Haaland v. Brackeen, 

, 295.
  Pp. 27–28.

, reversed and remanded.

   BARRETT, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS,
C. J., and SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, KAVANAUGH, and JACKSON, JJ., joined.
ALITO, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which THOMAS and GORSUCH, JJ.,
joined.
                        Cite as: 

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                             Opinion of the Court

     NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the
     United States Reports. Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of
     Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D. C. 20543,
     [email protected], of any typographical or other formal errors.


SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
                                   _________________

                                   No. 23–411
                                   _________________


  VIVEK H. MURTHY, SURGEON GENERAL, ET AL.,
        PETITIONERS v. MISSOURI, ET AL.
 ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF
            APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT
                                 [June 26, 2024]

  JUSTICE BARRETT delivered the opinion of the Court.
  During the 2020 election season and the COVID–19 pan-
demic, social-media platforms frequently removed, de-
moted, or fact checked posts containing allegedly false or
misleading information. At the same time, federal officials,
concerned about the spread of “misinformation” on social
media, communicated extensively with the platforms about
their content-moderation efforts.
  The plaintiffs, two States and five social-media users,
sued dozens of Executive Branch officials and agencies, al-
leging that they pressured the platforms to suppress pro-
tected speech in violation of the First Amendment. The
Fifth Circuit agreed, concluding that the officials’ commu-
nications rendered them responsible for the private plat-
forms’ moderation decisions. It then affirmed a sweeping
preliminary injunction.
  The Fifth Circuit was wrong to do so. To establish stand-
ing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that,
in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is tracea-
ble to a Government defendant and redressable by the in-
junction they seek. Because no plaintiff has carried that
burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.
2                       MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                          Opinion of the Court

                                I
                                A
   With their billions of active users, the world’s major so-
cial-media companies host a “staggering” amount of content
on their platforms. Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh, 

 (2023). Yet for many of these companies, including Fa-
cebook, Twitter, and YouTube, not everything goes.1 Under
their longstanding content-moderation policies, the plat-
forms have taken a range of actions to suppress certain cat-
egories of speech. They place warning labels on some posts,
while deleting others. They also “demote” content so that it
is less visible to other users. And they may suspend or ban
users who frequently post content that violates platform
policies.
   For years, the platforms have targeted speech they judge
to be false or misleading. For instance, in 2016, Facebook
began fact checking and demoting posts containing mis-
leading claims about elections. Since 2018, Facebook has
removed health-related misinformation, including false
claims about a measles outbreak in Samoa and the polio
vaccine in Pakistan. Likewise, in 2019, YouTube an-
nounced that it would “demonetize” channels that promote
anti-vaccine messages.
   In 2020, with the outbreak of COVID–19, the platforms
announced that they would enforce their policies against
users who post false or misleading content about the pan-
demic. As early as January 2020, Facebook deleted posts it
deemed false regarding “cures,” “treatments,” and the effect
of “physical distancing.” 60 Record on Appeal 19,035 (Rec-
ord). And it demoted posts containing what it described as
“conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus.” 

 at
——————
  1 Since the events of this suit, Twitter has merged into X Corp. and is

now known as X. Facebook is now known as Meta Platforms. For the
sake of clarity, we will refer to these platforms as Twitter and Facebook,
as they were known during the vast majority of the events underlying
this suit.
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                      Opinion of the Court

19,036. Twitter and YouTube began applying their policies
in March and May 2020, respectively. Throughout the pan-
demic, the platforms removed or reduced posts questioning
the efficacy and safety of mask wearing and the COVID–19
vaccine, along with posts on related topics.
   The platforms also applied their misinformation policies
during the 2020 Presidential election season. Facebook, in
late 2019, unveiled measures to counter foreign interfer-
ence campaigns and voter suppression efforts. One month
before the election, multiple platforms suppressed a report
about Hunter Biden’s laptop, believing that the story origi-
nated from a Russian hack-and-leak operation. After the
election, the platforms took action against users or posts
that questioned the integrity of the election results.
   Over the past few years, various federal officials regu-
larly spoke with the platforms about COVID–19 and
election-related misinformation. Officials at the White
House, the Office of the Surgeon General, and the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) focused on
COVID–19 content, while the Federal Bureau of Investiga-
tion (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Secu-
rity Agency (CISA) concentrated on elections.
   White House. In early 2021, and continuing primarily
through that year, the Director of Digital Strategy and
members of the COVID–19 response team interacted with
the platforms about their efforts to suppress vaccine misin-
formation. They expressed concern that Facebook in par-
ticular was “one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy,” due
to the spread of allegedly false or misleading claims on the
platform. App. 659–660. Thus, the officials peppered Face-
book (and to a lesser extent, Twitter and YouTube) with de-
tailed questions about their policies, pushed them to sup-
press certain content, and sometimes recommended policy
changes. Some of these communications were more aggres-
sive than others. For example, the director of Digital Strat-
egy, frustrated that Facebook had not removed a particular
4                   MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                     Opinion of the Court

post, complained: “[L]ast time we did this dance, it ended in
an insurrection.” Id., at 698. Another official, unhappy
with Facebook’s supposed lack of transparency about its
vaccine misinformation problems, wrote: “Internally we
have been considering our options on what to do about it.”
Id., at 657. Publicly, White House communications officials
called on the platforms to do more to address COVID–19
misinformation—and, perhaps as motivation, raised the
possibility of reforms aimed at the platforms, including
changes to the antitrust laws and 

.
   Surgeon General. In July 2021, Surgeon General Vivek
Murthy issued a health advisory on misinformation. The
advisory encouraged platforms to “[r]edesign recommenda-
tion algorithms to avoid amplifying misinformation,”
“[i]mpose clear consequences for accounts that repeatedly
violate platform policies,” and “[p]rovide information from
trusted and credible sources to prevent misconceptions
from taking hold.” 3 Record 662. At a press conference to
announce the advisory, Surgeon General Murthy argued
that the platforms should “operate with greater transpar-
ency and accountability.” 2 id., at 626. The following year,
the Surgeon General issued a “Request for Information,”
seeking, among other things, reports on each platform’s
“COVID–19 misinformation policies.” Impact of Health
Misinformation in the Digital Information Environment in
the United States Throughout the COVID–19 Pandemic
Request for Information (RFI), 

 (Mar. 7,
2022).
   CDC. Like the White House, the CDC frequently com-
municated with the platforms about COVID–19 misinfor-
mation. In early 2020, Facebook reached out to the agency,
seeking authoritative information about the virus that it
could post on the platform. The following year, the CDC’s
communications expanded to other platforms, including
Twitter and YouTube. The CDC hosted meetings and sent
reports to the platforms, alerting them to misinformation
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                      Opinion of the Court

trends and flagging example posts. The platforms often
asked the agency for fact checks on specific claims.
  FBI and CISA. These agencies communicated with the
platforms about election-related misinformation. They
hosted meetings with several platforms in advance of the
2020 Presidential election and the 2022 midterms. The FBI
alerted the platforms to posts containing false information
about voting, as well as pernicious foreign influence cam-
paigns that might spread on their sites. Shortly before the
2020 election, the FBI warned the platforms about the po-
tential for a Russian hack-and-leak operation. Some com-
panies then updated their moderation policies to prohibit
users from posting hacked materials. Until mid-2022,
CISA, through its “switchboarding” operations, forwarded
third-party reports of election-related misinformation to
the platforms. These communications typically stated that
the agency “w[ould] not take any action, favorable or unfa-
vorable, toward social media companies based on decisions
about how or whether to use this information.” 72 Record
23,223.
                               B
   Respondents are two States and five individual social-
media users. They were the plaintiffs below, and for the
sake of narrative clarity, we will refer to them as “plaintiffs”
in this opinion. (Likewise, we will refer to the Government
individuals and agencies as “defendants” rather than peti-
tioners.) The individual plaintiffs—three doctors, the
owner of a news website, and a healthcare activist—allege
that various platforms removed or demoted their COVID–
19 or election-related content between 2020 and 2023. The
States, Missouri and Louisiana, claim that the platforms
have suppressed the speech of state entities and officials, as
well as their citizens’ speech.
   Though the platforms restricted the plaintiffs’ content,
the plaintiffs maintain that the Federal Government was
6                       MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                          Opinion of the Court

behind it. Acting on that belief, the plaintiffs sued dozens
of Executive Branch officials and agencies, alleging that
they pressured the platforms to censor the plaintiffs’ speech
in violation of the First Amendment. The States filed their
complaint on May 5, 2022. The next month, they moved for
a preliminary injunction, seeking to stop the defendants
from “taking any steps to demand, urge, encourage, pres-
sure, or otherwise induce” any platform “to censor, sup-
press, remove, de-platform, suspend, shadow-ban, de-boost,
restrict access to content, or take any other adverse action
against any speaker, content, or viewpoint expressed on so-
cial media.” 1 id., at 253. The individual plaintiffs joined
the suit on August 2, 2022.
   After granting extensive discovery, the District Court is-
sued a preliminary injunction. Missouri v. Biden, 

, 729 (WD La. 2023). The court held that
officials at the White House, the Surgeon General’s Office,
the CDC, the FBI, and CISA likely “coerced” or “signifi-
cantly encouraged” the platforms “to such extent that the[ir
content-moderation] decision[s] should be deemed to be the
decisions of the Government.” Id., at 694 (internal quota-
tion marks omitted). It enjoined those agencies, along with
scores of named and unnamed officials and employees, from
taking actions “for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pres-
suring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion,
suppression, or reduction of content containing protected
free speech posted on social-medial platforms.” Missouri v.
Biden, 

, *1–*2 (WD La., July 4, 2023).2
   Following a grant of panel rehearing, the Fifth Circuit af-
firmed in part and reversed in part. Missouri v. Biden, 83
——————
   2 The District Court also enjoined the National Institute of Allergy and

Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the State Department, along with their
officials and employees. 680 F. Supp. 3d, at 700–701, 704–705. The Fifth
Circuit removed these entities and individuals from the injunction, how-
ever, so they are not before us. Missouri v. Biden, 

(2023).
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                          Opinion of the Court

F. 4th 350 (2023). It first held that the individual plaintiffs
had Article III standing to seek injunctive relief, reasoning
that the social-media companies had suppressed the plain-
tiffs’ speech in the past and were likely to do so again in the
future, id., at 367–369, and that both of these injuries were
“traceable to government-coerced enforcement” of the plat-
form’s policies and “redressable by an injunction against
the government officials,” id., at 373. The court also con-
cluded that the States had standing, both because the plat-
forms had restricted the posts of individual state officials
and because the States have the “right to listen” to their
citizens on social media. Id., at 371–372.
   On the merits, the Fifth Circuit explained that “a private
party’s conduct may be state action if the government co-
erced or significantly encouraged it.” Id., at 380 (citing
Blum v. Yaretsky, 

 (1982); emphasis de-
leted). To identify coercion, it asked whether “the govern-
ment compelled the [private party’s] decision by . . . inti-
mating that some form of punishment will follow a failure
to comply.” 

. The court explained that the
Government significantly encourages a private party’s
choice when it exercises “active, meaningful control,
whether by entanglement in the party’s decision-making
process or direct involvement in carrying out the decision
itself.” 

.3
   Applying those tests, the Fifth Circuit determined that
White House officials, in conjunction with the Surgeon Gen-
eral’s Office, likely both coerced and significantly encour-
aged the platforms to moderate content. 

. The
court concluded that the same was true for the FBI. 

It held that the CDC and CISA significantly encouraged
(but did not coerce) the platforms’ moderation decisions.

——————
  3 Because we do not reach the merits, we express no view as to whether

the Fifth Circuit correctly articulated the standard for when the Govern-
ment transforms private conduct into state action.
8                   MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                      Opinion of the Court

.
  The Fifth Circuit agreed with the District Court that the
equities favored the plaintiffs. 

 at 392–394. It then
modified the District Court’s injunction to state that the de-
fendants, and their employees and agents, shall not “ ‘coerce
or significantly encourage social-media companies to re-
move, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through alter-
ing their algorithms, posted social-media content contain-
ing protected free speech.’ ” 

. The court did not
limit the injunction to the platforms that the plaintiffs use
or the topics that the plaintiffs wish to discuss, explaining
that the harms stemming from the defendants’ conduct “im-
pac[t] every social-media user.” 

.
  The federal agencies and officials applied to this Court for
emergency relief. We stayed the injunction, treated the ap-
plication as a petition for a writ of certiorari, and granted
the petition. 

 (2023).
                              II
  We begin—and end—with standing. At this stage, nei-
ther the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established
standing to seek an injunction against any defendant. We
therefore lack jurisdiction to reach the merits of the dis-
pute.
                              A
   Article III of the Constitution limits the jurisdiction of
federal courts to “Cases” and “Controversies.” The “case or
controversy” requirement is “ ‘fundamental to the judici-
ary’s proper role in our system of government.’ ” Raines v.
Byrd, 

 (1997) (quoting Simon v. Eastern
Ky. Welfare Rights Organization, 

 (1976)).
Federal courts can only review statutes and executive ac-
tions when necessary “to redress or prevent actual or immi-
nently threatened injury to persons caused by . . . official
violation of law.” Summers v. Earth Island Institute, 555
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                      Opinion of the Court

U. S. 488, 492 (2009). As this Court has explained, “[i]f a
dispute is not a proper case or controversy, the courts have
no business deciding it, or expounding the law in the course
of doing so.” DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno, 

 (2006).
   A proper case or controversy exists only when at least one
plaintiff “establish[es] that [she] ha[s] standing to sue.”
Raines, 

; Department of Commerce v. New
York, 

 (2019). She must show that she
has suffered, or will suffer, an injury that is “concrete, par-
ticularized, and actual or imminent; fairly traceable to the
challenged action; and redressable by a favorable ruling.”
Clapper v. Amnesty Int’l USA, 

 (2013) (in-
ternal quotation marks omitted). These requirements help
ensure that the plaintiff has “such a personal stake in the
outcome of the controversy as to warrant [her] invocation of
federal-court jurisdiction.” Summers, 555 U. S., at 493 (in-
ternal quotation marks omitted).
   The plaintiffs claim standing based on the “direct censor-
ship” of their own speech as well as their “right to listen” to
others who faced social-media censorship. Brief for Re-
spondents 19, 22. Notably, both theories depend on the
platform’s actions—yet the plaintiffs do not seek to enjoin
the platforms from restricting any posts or accounts. They
seek to enjoin Government agencies and officials from pres-
suring or encouraging the platforms to suppress protected
speech in the future.
   The one-step-removed, anticipatory nature of their al-
leged injuries presents the plaintiffs with two particular
challenges. First, it is a bedrock principle that a federal
court cannot redress “injury that results from the independ-
ent action of some third party not before the court.” Simon,
426 U. S., at 41–42. In keeping with this principle, we have
“been reluctant to endorse standing theories that require
guesswork as to how independent decisionmakers will ex-
ercise their judgment.” Clapper, 

. Rather
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                       Opinion of the Court

than guesswork, the plaintiffs must show that the third-
party platforms “will likely react in predictable ways” to the
defendants’ conduct. Department of Commerce, 

. Second, because the plaintiffs request forward-look-
ing relief, they must face “a real and immediate threat of
repeated injury.” O’Shea v. Littleton, 

(1974); see also Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, 

, 158 (2014) (“An allegation of future injury may
suffice if the threatened injury is certainly impending, or
there is a substantial risk that the harm will occur” (inter-
nal quotation marks omitted)). Putting these requirements
together, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that,
in the near future, at least one platform will restrict the
speech of at least one plaintiff in response to the actions of
at least one Government defendant. On this record, that is
a tall order.
   Before we evaluate the plaintiffs’ different theories, a few
preliminaries: The plaintiff “bears the burden of establish-
ing standing as of the time [s]he brought th[e] lawsuit and
maintaining it thereafter.” Carney v. Adams, 

 (2020). She must support each element of standing “with
the manner and degree of evidence required at the succes-
sive stages of the litigation.” Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife,

 (1992). At the preliminary injunction
stage, then, the plaintiff must make a “clear showing” that
she is “likely” to establish each element of standing. See
Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 

 (2008) (emphasis deleted). Where, as here, the parties
have taken discovery, the plaintiff cannot rest on “mere al-
legations,” but must instead point to factual evidence. See
Lujan, 

 (internal quotation marks omitted).
                                B
                                1
     The plaintiffs’ primary theory of standing involves their
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                      Opinion of the Court

“direct censorship injuries.” They claim that the re-
strictions they have experienced in the past on various plat-
forms are traceable to the defendants and that the plat-
forms will continue to censor their speech at the behest of
the defendants. So we first consider whether the plaintiffs
have demonstrated traceability for their past injuries.
   Here, a note of caution: If the plaintiffs were seeking com-
pensatory relief, the traceability of their past injuries would
be the whole ball game. But because the plaintiffs are seek-
ing only forward-looking relief, the past injuries are rele-
vant only for their predictive value. See O’Shea, 414 U. S.,
at 495–496 (“Past exposure to illegal conduct” can serve as
evidence of threatened future injury but “does not in itself
show a present case or controversy regarding injunctive re-
lief ”). If a plaintiff demonstrates that a particular Govern-
ment defendant was behind her past social-media re-
striction, it will be easier for her to prove that she faces a
continued risk of future restriction that is likely to be trace-
able to that same defendant. Conversely, if a plaintiff can-
not trace her past injury to one of the defendants, it will be
much harder for her to make that showing. See Clapper,

. In the latter situation, the plaintiff would
essentially have to build her case from scratch, showing
why she has some newfound reason to fear that one of the
named defendants will coerce her chosen platform to re-
strict future speech on a topic about which she plans to
post—in this case, either COVID–19 or the upcoming elec-
tion. Keep in mind, therefore, that the past is relevant only
insofar as it is a launching pad for a showing of imminent
future injury.
   The primary weakness in the record of past restrictions
is the lack of specific causation findings with respect to any
discrete instance of content moderation. The District Court
made none. Nor did the Fifth Circuit, which approached
standing at a high level of generality. The platforms, it rea-
soned, “have engaged in censorship of certain viewpoints on
12                      MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                          Opinion of the Court

key issues,” while “the government has engaged in a years-
long pressure campaign” to ensure that the platforms sup-
press those viewpoints. 

. The platforms’
“censorship decisions”—including those affecting the plain-
tiffs—were thus “likely attributable at least in part to the
platforms’ reluctance to risk” the consequences of refusing
to “adhere to the government’s directives.” 

   We reject this overly broad assertion. As already dis-
cussed, the platforms moderated similar content long before
any of the Government defendants engaged in the chal-
lenged conduct. In fact, the platforms, acting inde-
pendently, had strengthened their pre-existing content-
moderation policies before the Government defendants got
involved. For instance, Facebook announced an expansion
of its COVID–19 misinformation policies in early February
2021, before White House officials began communicating
with the platform. And the platforms continued to exercise
their independent judgment even after communications
with the defendants began. For example, on several occa-
sions, various platforms explained that White House offi-
cials had flagged content that did not violate company pol-
icy. Moreover, the platforms did not speak only with the
defendants about content moderation; they also regularly
consulted with outside experts.
   This evidence indicates that the platforms had independ-
ent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their
own judgment. To be sure, the record reflects that the Gov-
ernment defendants played a role in at least some of the
platforms’ moderation choices. But the Fifth Circuit, by at-
tributing every platform decision at least in part to the de-
fendants, glossed over complexities in the evidence.4

——————
  4 The Fifth Circuit relied on the District Court’s factual findings, many

of which unfortunately appear to be clearly erroneous. The District
Court found that the defendants and the platforms had an “efficient re-
port-and-censor relationship.” Missouri v. Biden, 

,
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                           Opinion of the Court

   The Fifth Circuit also erred by treating the defendants,
plaintiffs, and platforms each as a unified whole. Our deci-
sions make clear that “standing is not dispensed in gross.”
TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 

 (2021).
That is, “plaintiffs must demonstrate standing for each
claim that they press” against each defendant, “and for each
form of relief that they seek.” 

 Here, for every defend-
ant, there must be at least one plaintiff with standing to
seek an injunction. This requires a certain threshold show-
ing: namely, that a particular defendant pressured a par-
ticular platform to censor a particular topic before that plat-
form suppressed a particular plaintiff ’s speech on that
topic.
   Heeding these conditions is critically important in a
sprawling suit like this one. The plaintiffs faced speech re-
strictions on different platforms, about different topics, at
——————
715 (WD La. 2023). But much of its evidence is inapposite. For instance,
the court says that Twitter set up a “streamlined process for censorship
requests” after the White House “bombarded” it with such requests.
Ibid., n. 662 (internal quotation marks omitted). The record it cites says
nothing about “censorship requests.” See App. 639–642. Rather, in re-
sponse to a White House official asking Twitter to remove an imperson-
ation account of President Biden’s granddaughter, Twitter told the offi-
cial about a portal that he could use to flag similar issues. 

 This
has nothing to do with COVID–19 misinformation. The court also found
that “[a] drastic increase in censorship . . . directly coincided with De-
fendants’ public calls for censorship and private demands for censor-
ship.” 680 F. Supp. 3d, at 715. As to the “calls for censorship,” the court’s
proof included statements from Members of Congress, who are not par-
ties to this suit. Ibid., and n. 658. Some of the evidence of the “increase
in censorship” reveals that Facebook worked with the CDC to update its
list of removable false claims, but these examples do not suggest that the
agency “demand[ed]” that it do so. Ibid. Finally, the court, echoing the
plaintiffs’ proposed statement of facts, erroneously stated that Facebook
agreed to censor content that did not violate its policies. Id., at 714,
n. 655. Instead, on several occasions, Facebook explained that certain
content did not qualify for removal under its policies but did qualify for
other forms of moderation.
14                  MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                      Opinion of the Court

different times. Different groups of defendants communi-
cated with different platforms, about different topics, at dif-
ferent times. And even where the plaintiff, platform, time,
content, and defendant line up, the links must be evaluated
in light of the platform’s independent incentives to moder-
ate content. As discussed, the platforms began to suppress
the plaintiffs’ COVID–19 content before the defendants’
challenged communications started, which complicates the
plaintiffs’ effort to demonstrate that each platform acted
due to “government-coerced enforcement” of its policies, 

 (emphasis deleted), rather than in its own
judgment as an “ ‘independent acto[r],’ ” Lujan, 

. With these factors in mind, we proceed to untangle the
mass of the plaintiffs’ injuries and Government communi-
cations.
                               2
  The plaintiffs rely on allegations of past Government cen-
sorship as evidence that future censorship is likely. But
they fail, by and large, to link their past social-media re-
strictions to the defendants’ communications with the plat-
forms. Thus, the events of the past do little to help any of
the plaintiffs establish standing to seek an injunction to
prevent future harms.
  Louisiana and Missouri. The state plaintiffs devote min-
imal attention to restriction of their own social-media con-
tent, much less to a causal link between any such re-
striction and the actions of any Government defendant.
They refer only to Facebook’s “flagg[ing] . . . and de-
boost[ing]” of a Louisiana state representative’s post about
children and the COVID–19 vaccine. Brief for Respondents
20; App. 635–636. We need not decide whether an injury to
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                           Opinion of the Court

a state representative counts as an injury to the State, be-
cause evidence of causation is lacking.5 The States assert
only that in November 2021, Facebook, “as a result of [its]
work [with the CDC],” updated its policies “to remove addi-
tional false claims about the COVID–19 vaccine for chil-
dren.” 37 Record 11,457. But they never say when Face-
book took action against the official’s post—and a causal
link is possible only if the removal occurred after Facebook’s
communication with the CDC. There is therefore no evi-
dence to support the States’ allegation that Facebook re-
stricted the state representative pursuant to the CDC-
influenced policy.
   Jayanta Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron
Kheriarty. These plaintiffs are doctors who questioned the
wisdom of then-prevailing COVID–19 policies, including
lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. Each faced his
first social-media restriction in 2020, before the White
House and the CDC entered discussions with the relevant
platforms. Plaintiffs highlight restrictions imposed by
Twitter and LinkedIn, starting in 2021, on Dr. Kulldorff ’s
posts about natural immunity. They also point out that
Twitter restricted the visibility of Dr. Kheriarty’s posts
about vaccine safety and efficacy, as well as the ethics sur-
rounding vaccine mandates. Attempting to show causation,
the plaintiffs emphasize that in January 2022, Facebook re-
ported to White House officials that it had recently demoted
one post advocating for natural immunity over vaccine im-
munity. But neither the timing nor the platforms line up
(nor, in Dr. Kheriarty’s case, does the content), so the plain-
tiffs cannot show that these restrictions were traceable to
the White House officials. In fact, there is no record evi-
dence that White House officials ever communicated at all
——————
  5 The Fifth Circuit held that States “sustain a direct injury when the

social-media accounts of state officials are censored due to federal coer-
cion.” 

. Because the State failed to show that its official
was censored, we need not express a view on this theory.
16                  MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                      Opinion of the Court

with LinkedIn.
   Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff claim that, after disa-
greeing with the CDC and other federal health officials,
they faced a “relentless covert campaign of social-media
censorship.” App. 585 (emphasis deleted). They refer to the
platforms’ suppression of the Great Barrington Declara-
tion, their coauthored report calling for an end to lock-
downs. But their declarations do not suggest that anyone
at the CDC was involved; rather, they point to officials at
the National Institutes of Health and the NIAID. Those
entities are not before us. With nothing else to show, Drs.
Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and Kheriarty have not estab-
lished a likelihood that their past restrictions are traceable
to either the White House officials or the CDC.
   Jim Hoft. Both Hoft and his news website, “The Gateway
Pundit,” experienced election and COVID–19-related re-
strictions on various platforms. Hoft tries to demonstrate
his standing to sue only the FBI and CISA, which means
that only the suppression of his election-related posts is rel-
evant. (As already discussed, the record contains no evi-
dence that either the FBI or CISA engaged with the plat-
forms about the pandemic.) First, Hoft points to the FBI’s
role in the platforms’ adoption of hacked-material policies.
And he claims that Twitter, in December 2020, censored
content about the Hunter Biden laptop story under such a
policy. The post was titled: “Where’s Hunter? How is
Hunter Celebrating the New Year? New Photos of Hunter
Biden Pushing Drugs on Women Emerge.” Hoft’s own dec-
laration reveals that Twitter acted according to its “rules
against posting or sharing privately produced/distributed
intimate media of someone without their express consent.”
Id., at 608. Hoft provides no evidence that Twitter adopted
a policy against posting private, intimate content in re-
sponse to the FBI’s warnings about hack-and-leak opera-
tions. Plus, it was Hoft’s brother, Joe Hoft, who posted this
tweet; Twitter therefore suspended Joe Hoft’s account. It is
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                      Opinion of the Court

unclear why Jim Hoft would have standing to sue for his
brother’s injury.
  Hoft claims that his content appears on a CISA document
tracking posts that various entities had flagged for the plat-
forms as misinformation. The spreadsheet shows that a
private entity, the Election Integrity Partnership—not
CISA—alerted Twitter to an unidentified article from the
Gateway Pundit. And the spreadsheet does not reveal
whether Twitter removed or otherwise suppressed that
post. This evidence does not support the conclusion that
Hoft’s past injuries are likely traceable to the FBI or CISA.
  Jill Hines. Of all the plaintiffs, Hines makes the best
showing of a connection between her social-media re-
strictions and communications between the relevant plat-
form (Facebook) and specific defendants (CDC and the
White House). That said, most of the lines she draws are
tenuous, particularly given her burden of proof at the pre-
liminary injunction stage—recall that she must show that
her restrictions are likely traceable to the White House and
the CDC.
  A healthcare activist, Hines codirects “Health Freedom
Louisiana,” a group that advocated against COVID–19
mask and vaccine mandates. In October 2020—before the
start of communications with the White House and the bulk
of communications with the CDC—Facebook began to re-
duce the reach of Hines’ and Health Freedom’s pages.
Hines tries to connect Facebook’s subsequent actions
against her to both the White House officials and the CDC.
  First, Facebook “deplatformed” (i.e., deleted) one of
Health Freedom’s groups in July 2021. The last post in the
group asked members to contact state legislators about
health freedom legislation. Three months earlier, a White
House official sent Facebook several “suggestions” that
were “circulating around the building and informing think-
ing,” including that the platform should “end group recom-
18                      MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                          Opinion of the Court

mendations for groups with a history of COVID–19 or vac-
cine misinformation.” 54 Record 16,870–16,871. A week
later, Facebook replied that it had “already removed all
health groups from our recommendation feature.” App.
716. It is hard to know what to make of this. Facebook
reported that it had already acted, which tends to imply
that Facebook made its decision independently of the White
House. Moreover, Facebook and the White House commu-
nicated about removing groups from recommendation fea-
tures, not deleting them altogether—further weakening the
inference that Facebook was implementing White House
policy rather than its own.6
   Next, in April 2023, Facebook gave Hines a warning after
she reposted content from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Two
years earlier, White House officials had pushed Facebook to
remove the accounts of the “disinformation dozen,” 12 peo-
ple (including Kennedy) supposedly responsible for a ma-
jority of COVID–19-related misinformation. Hines tries to
link the warning she received to this earlier White House
pressure. Again, though, the link is weak. There is no evi-
dence that the White House asked Facebook to censor every
user who reposts a member of the disinformation dozen, nor
did Facebook change its policies to do so. Facebook’s 2023
warning to Hines bears only a tangential relationship to the
White House’s 2021 directive to Facebook.
   Hines traces her remaining restrictions to the CDC. Be-
ginning in October 2020, Facebook fact checked Hines’
posts about pregnant women taking the COVID–19 vaccine,
——————
  6 Hines tries to link this restriction to the Surgeon General’s Office as

well, suggesting that the White House and Surgeon General together
pressured Facebook. But the record reveals that a White House official
sent the relevant email, and Facebook responded only to White House
officials. The Surgeon General’s Office was seemingly uninvolved. Thus,
Hines cannot demonstrate that her past restriction is traceable to the
Surgeon General’s Office. The plaintiffs do not attempt to draw any
other connections between their restrictions and the Surgeon General’s
Office.
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                       Opinion of the Court

along with posts including data from the Vaccine Adverse
Event Reporting System (VAERS). And in March 2021, the
CDC flagged several misinformation trends for Facebook,
including claims related to pregnancy and VAERS data.
Because Hines does not provide dates for the fact checks,
we cannot know whether the CDC could be responsible.
   In May 2022, Facebook restricted Hines’ account for post-
ing an article discussing increased rates of myocarditis in
teenagers following vaccination. A little over a year earlier,
the CDC warned Facebook against claims of “unsubstanti-
ated links to new [vaccine] side effects,” including “ ‘irri-
tab[ility],’ ” “ ‘auto-immune issues, infertility,’ ” and “ ‘neuro-
logical damage including lowered IQ.’ ” 54 Record 17,042–
17,043 (emphasis deleted). There is no evidence that the
CDC ever listed myocarditis as an unsubstantiated side ef-
fect—but because it is an alleged side effect, it at least falls
under the same umbrella as the CDC’s communication.
Health Freedom’s February 2023 violation, by contrast, was
for posting that vaccine manufacturers would not compen-
sate those with vaccine-related injuries—a topic that bears
little resemblance to the content that the CDC flagged.
   In April 2023, Hines received violations for posts about
children and the vaccine. In November 2021, Facebook
worked with the CDC to update its policies to remove addi-
tional false claims including that “ ‘the COVID vaccine is
not safe for kids.’ ” 37 id., at 11,457. It is not clear that
either of Hines’ posts violated the CDC-influenced policy
against false claims related to children and the vaccine.
One simply referred to the World Health Organization’s
COVID–19 vaccine recommendations for children, and the
other discussed the role of children within the “predatory”
pharmaceutical industry. App. 789–790. Given the loose
match between the policy and the posts, it is hard to call it
“likely” that Facebook was enforcing the CDC’s preferences
20                      MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                          Opinion of the Court

rather than its own.7
   With one or two potentially viable links, Hines makes the
best showing of all the plaintiffs. Still, Facebook was tar-
geting her pages before almost all of its communications
with the White House and the CDC, which weakens the in-
ference that her subsequent restrictions are likely traceable
to “government-coerced enforcement” of Facebook’s policies,

 (emphasis deleted), rather than to Face-
book’s independent judgment.8 Even assuming, however,
——————
   7 The dissent does not dispute the Court’s assessment of these asserted

links. Instead, the dissent draws links that Hines herself has not set
forth, often based on injuries that Hines never claimed. Compare post,
at 19–20, with Brief for Respondents 19–20; App. 628–632. For instance,
the dissent says that in May 2021, Facebook began demoting content
from accounts that repeatedly shared misinformation, purportedly due
to White House pressure. Post, at 10, 19. Because Facebook frequently
fact checked Hines’ posts, the dissent simply assumes (without citing
Hines’ declarations) that her content was subsequently hidden from her
friends’ feeds. Post, at 19. Likewise, pointing to an August 2021 policy
change, the dissent concludes that the mid-July 2021 deplatforming of
one of Hines’ groups rendered her other pages “non-recommendable.”

 Hines, however, never claimed as much—and the plaintiffs bear
the burden to establish standing by setting forth “specific facts.” Lujan
v. Defenders of Wildlife, 

 (1992) (internal quotation
marks omitted). It is especially important to hold the plaintiffs to their
burden in a case like this one, where the record spans over 26,000 pages
and the lower courts did not make any specific causation findings. As
the Seventh Circuit has memorably put it, “[j]udges are not like pigs,
hunting for truffles buried [in the record].” Gross v. Cicero, 

 (2010) (internal quotation marks omitted).
   8 By acknowledging the real possibility that Facebook acted inde-

pendently in suppressing Hines’ content, we are not applying a “new and
heightened standard,” as the dissent claims. Post, at 20. The whole pur-
pose of the traceability requirement is to ensure that “in fact, the as-
serted injury was the consequence of the defendants’ actions,” rather
than of “the independent action” of a third party. Simon v. Eastern Ky.
Welfare Rights Organization, 

 (1976). Nor is our anal-
ysis inconsistent with Department of Commerce v. New York, 

 (2019). See post, at 19. There, the plaintiffs, including several
States, challenged the Secretary of Commerce’s decision to reinstate a
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                          Opinion of the Court

that Hines has eked out a showing of traceability for her
past injuries, the past is relevant only insofar as it predicts
the future. And this weak record gives her little momentum
going forward.
                              3
  To obtain forward-looking relief, the plaintiffs must es-
tablish a substantial risk of future injury that is traceable
to the Government defendants and likely to be redressed by
an injunction against them. To carry that burden, the
plaintiffs must proffer evidence that the defendants’ “alleg-
edly wrongful behavior w[ould] likely occur or continue.”
——————
citizenship question on the census. 

. They argued
that this question would make noncitizens less likely to respond to the
census, leading to an inaccurate population count and the concomitant
loss of congressional seats and federal funding. 

 at 766–767. The
plaintiffs’ injuries thus depended on the actions of third parties. 

 at
767–768. The District Court found that noncitizens had historically re-
sponded at lower rates than citizens to previous versions of the census
(and other surveys) that included a citizenship question and that noncit-
izens were disproportionately likely to stop responding to those question-
naires once they reached the citizenship question. New York v. United
States Dept. of Commerce, 

, 578–579 (SDNY 2019).
Crediting those findings, this Court concluded that the plaintiffs “met
their burden of showing that third parties will likely react in predictable
ways to the citizenship question.” Department of Commerce, 

. The dissent suggests that it “would have been difficult for [the
plaintiffs] to determine which noncitizen households failed to respond to
the census because of a citizenship question and which had other rea-
sons.” Post, at 20. But the evidence made clear that the citizenship ques-
tion drove noncitizens’ lower response rates; the District Court made no
findings about noncitizens’ response rates to the census generally. Here,
by contrast, the evidence is murky. Facebook targeted Hines’ posts (and
others like hers) before the White House entered the picture, meaning
that Facebook had independent incentives to restrict Hines’ content. It
is therefore difficult to say that the White House was responsible (even
in part) for all of Hines’ later restrictions—especially absent clear links
between White House content-moderation requests to Facebook and Fa-
cebook’s actions toward Hines. Cf. post, at 21.
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                      Opinion of the Court

Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Ser-
vices (TOC), Inc., 

 (2000). At the prelim-
inary injunction stage, the plaintiffs must show that they
are likely to succeed in carrying that burden. See Winter,

. But without proof of an ongoing pressure
campaign, it is entirely speculative that the platforms’ fu-
ture moderation decisions will be attributable, even in part,
to the defendants.
   The plaintiffs treat the defendants as a monolith, claim-
ing broadly that “ ‘the governmen[t]’ ” continues to com-
municate with the platforms about “ ‘content-moderation is-
sues.’ ” Brief for Respondents 29 (quoting 

).
But we must confirm that each Government defendant con-
tinues to engage in the challenged conduct, which is “coer-
cion” and “significant encouragement,” not mere “communi-
cation.” Plus, the plaintiffs have only explicitly identified
an interest in speaking about COVID–19 or elections—so
the defendants’ discussions about content-moderation is-
sues must focus on those topics.
   We begin with the plaintiffs who have not pointed to any
past restrictions likely traceable to the Government defend-
ants. This failure to establish traceability for past harms—
which can serve as evidence of expected future harm—“sub-
stantially undermines [the plaintiffs’] standing theory.”
Clapper, 

. These plaintiffs (i.e., everyone
other than Hines) are thus particularly ill suited to the task
of establishing their standing to seek forward-looking relief.
   Take Hoft, the only plaintiff who has expressed interest
in speaking about elections (and thus the only plaintiff with
potential standing to sue the FBI and CISA). The FBI’s
challenged conduct was ongoing at the time of the com-
plaint, as the agency worked with the platforms during the
2022 midterm election season. Still, Hoft must rely on a
“speculative chain of possibilities” to establish a likelihood
of future harm traceable to the FBI. 

. Hoft’s fu-
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                      Opinion of the Court

ture posts (presumably about the 2024 Presidential elec-
tion) must contain content that falls within a misinfor-
mation trend that the FBI has identified or will identify in
the future. The FBI must pressure the platforms to remove
content within that category. The platform must then sup-
press Hoft’s post, and it must do so at least partly in re-
sponse to the FBI, rather than in keeping with its own con-
tent-moderation policy. Hoft cannot satisfy his burden with
such conjecture. CISA, meanwhile, stopped switchboarding
in mid-2022, and the Government has represented that it
will not resume operations for the 2024 election. Especially
in light of his poor showing of traceability in the past, Hoft
has failed to demonstrate likely future injury at the hands
of the FBI or CISA—so the injunction against those entities
cannot survive.
   The doctors and the state plaintiffs, who focus on
COVID–19 content, have a similarly uphill battle vis-à-vis
the White House, the Surgeon General’s Office, and the
CDC. Hines, with her superior showing on past harm, is in
a slightly better position to demonstrate likely future harm
at the hands of these defendants. Still, she has not shown
enough.
   Starting with the White House and Surgeon General’s Of-
fice, the vast majority of their public and private engage-
ment with the platforms occurred in 2021, when the pan-
demic was still in full swing. By August 2022, when Hines
joined the case, the officials’ communications about
COVID–19 misinformation had slowed to a trickle. Pub-
licly, the White House Press Secretary made two state-
ments in February and April 2022. First, she said that the
platforms should continue “call[ing] out misinformation
and disinformation.” 3 Record 758. Two months later, she
spoke generally about §230 and antitrust reform, but did
not mention content moderation or COVID–19 misinfor-
mation. In March 2022, the Surgeon General issued a vol-
untary “Request for Information” from the platforms about
24                       MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                           Opinion of the Court

their misinformation policies.9
   Privately, Facebook sent monthly “Covid Insights” re-
ports to officials in the White House and the Surgeon Gen-
eral’s Office, at least until July 2022. These reports con-
tained information about the top 100 vaccine-related posts
in the United States, including whether Facebook took ac-
tion against any of them. In June, Facebook asked if it
should continue sending these reports, as it had stopped
seeing “problematic vaccine related” content in the top
posts. 50 id., at 15,645–15,646. The official replied that,
though he would “normally say we are good to discontinue,”
the reports would be helpful “as we start to ramp up . . .
vaccines” for children under five. Id., at 15,645. The record
contains no other evidence of private contact with respect
to COVID–19 misinformation.
   On this record, it appears that the frequent, intense com-
munications that took place in 2021 had considerably sub-
sided by 2022. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the changed
state of the pandemic.) It is thus very difficult for Hines to
show that she faces future harm that is traceable to officials
in the White House and the Surgeon General’s Office. Re-
call the Fifth Circuit’s reasoning regarding traceability for
past harms: In the face of a governmental “pressure cam-
paign,” the “platforms’ censorship decisions were likely at-
tributable at least in part to [their] reluctance to risk the
adverse legal or regulatory consequences that could result
from a refusal to adhere to the government’s directives.” 

. But in the months leading up to this suit,
these officials issued no directives and threatened no con-
sequences. They only asked for information about the most
popular vaccine-related posts. Hines does not allege that
her content has fallen, or is likely to fall, in that category.
——————
   9 According to a declaration submitted by the Surgeon General’s Chief

of Staff, no one in that office met with the platforms to discuss their sub-
missions “or otherwise had substantive communications with social me-
dia companies about the RFI.” 61 Record 19,480.
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                           Opinion of the Court

   In these circumstances, Hines cannot rely on “the predict-
able effect of Government action on the decisions of third
parties”; rather, she can only “speculat[e] about the deci-
sions of third parties.” Department of Commerce, 

. It is “no more than conjecture” to assume that Hines
will be subject to White House-induced content moderation.
Los Angeles v. Lyons, 

 (1983). Hines (along
with the other plaintiffs) has therefore failed to establish a
likelihood of future injury traceable to the White House or
the Surgeon General’s Office. Likewise, the risk of future
harm traceable to the CDC is minimal. The CDC stopped
meeting with the platforms in March 2022. Thereafter, the
platforms sporadically asked the CDC to verify or debunk
several claims about vaccines. But the agency has not re-
ceived any such message since the summer of 2022.10
   The plaintiffs’ counterarguments do not persuade. First,
they argue that they suffer “continuing, present adverse ef-
fects” from their past restrictions, as they must now self-
censor on social media. O’Shea, 

. But the
plaintiffs “cannot manufacture standing merely by inflict-
ing harm on themselves based on their fears of hypothetical
future harm that is not certainly impending.” Clapper, 

. And as we explained, the plaintiffs have not
shown that they are likely to face a risk of future censorship
traceable to the defendants. Indeed, even before the defend-
ants entered the scene, the plaintiffs “had a similar incen-
tive to engage in” self-censorship, given the platforms’ inde-
pendent content moderation. 

. So it is “difficult
——————
  10 The dissent claims that the future injury prong is satisfied because

Facebook continued to censor Hines at the time of her complaint and
thereafter. Post, at 17. But the dissent gives short shrift to the key point:
By the time Hines filed suit in August 2022, the White House was no
longer engaged in any sort of “pressure campaign” toward Facebook.
(Note that the dissent, in its 10-page recounting of the record, devotes
only one paragraph to the events of 2022. Post, at 14.) Thus, when Hines
sued, it was unlikely that Facebook’s actions were fairly traceable to the
White House at the time—or would be going forward.
26                  MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                      Opinion of the Court

to see how” the plaintiffs’ self-censorship “can be traced to”
the defendants. 

   Second, the plaintiffs and the dissent suggest that the
platforms continue to suppress their speech according to
policies initially adopted under Government pressure.
Post, at 21. That may be true. But the plaintiffs have a
redressability problem. “To determine whether an injury is
redressable,” we “consider the relationship between ‘the ju-
dicial relief requested’ and the ‘injury’ suffered.” California
v. Texas, 

 (2021). The plaintiffs assert
several injuries—their past social-media restrictions, cur-
rent self-censorship, and likely social-media restrictions in
the future. The requested judicial relief, meanwhile, is an
injunction stopping certain Government agencies and em-
ployees from coercing or encouraging the platforms to sup-
press speech. A court could prevent these Government de-
fendants from interfering with the platforms’ independent
application of their policies. But without evidence of con-
tinued pressure from the defendants, it appears that the
platforms remain free to enforce, or not to enforce, those
policies—even those tainted by initial governmental coer-
cion. The platforms are “not parties to the suit, and there
is no reason they should be obliged to honor an incidental
legal determination the suit produced.” Lujan, 

 (plurality opinion); see also Haaland v. Brackeen,

, 293–294 (2023).
   Indeed, the available evidence indicates that the plat-
forms have enforced their policies against COVID–19 mis-
information even as the Federal Government has wound
down its own pandemic response measures. For instance,
Hines reports that Facebook imposed several restrictions
on her vaccine-related posts in the spring of 2023. Around
the same time, in April 2023, President Biden signed a joint
resolution that ended the national COVID–19 emergency.
See Pub. L. 118–3, 

. The next month, the White
House disbanded its COVID–19 Response Team, which was
                       Cite as: 

 (2024)                       27

                            Opinion of the Court

responsible for many of the challenged communications in
this case. Enjoining the Government defendants, therefore,
is unlikely to affect the platforms’ content-moderation deci-
sions.11
                             C
  We conclude briefly with the plaintiffs’ “right to listen”
theory. The individual plaintiffs claim an interest in read-
ing and engaging with the content of other speakers on so-
cial media. The First Amendment, they argue, protects
that interest. Thus, the plaintiffs assert injuries based on
the restrictions that countless other social-media users
have experienced.
  This theory is startlingly broad, as it would grant all
social-media users the right to sue over someone else’s cen-
sorship—at least so long as they claim an interest in that
person’s speech. This Court has “never accepted such a
boundless theory of standing.” Already, LLC v. Nike, Inc.,

 (2013). While we have recognized a “First
Amendment right to ‘receive information and ideas,’ ” we
——————
  11 As with traceability, the dissent is wrong to claim that we are apply-

ing a “new and elevated standard for redressability.” Post, at 22. Far
from holding plaintiffs to a “certainty” standard, ibid., we simply con-
clude that an injunction against the Government defendants is unlikely
to stop the platforms from suppressing the plaintiffs’ speech. And while
traceability and redressability are “ ‘often “flip sides of the same coin,” ’ ”
post, at 22 (quoting FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, 

 (2024); emphasis added), that is not always the case. Facebook
might continue to remove Hines’ posts under a policy that it adopted at
the White House’s behest (thus satisfying traceability). But if the White
House officials have already abandoned their pressure campaign, enjoin-
ing them is unlikely to prompt Facebook to stop enforcing the policy (thus
failing redressability). Finally, by invoking Massachusetts v. EPA, it is
the dissent that applies a new and loosened standard for redressability.
Post, at 22. In that case, we explained that state plaintiffs are “entitled
to special solicitude” when it comes to standing, and we conducted our
analysis accordingly. 

 (2007). That “special solicitude”
does not apply to Jill Hines, an individual.
28                  MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                      Opinion of the Court

have identified a cognizable injury only where the listener
has a concrete, specific connection to the speaker.
Kleindienst v. Mandel, 

 (1972). For in-
stance, in Mandel, we agreed that a group of professors had
a First Amendment interest in challenging the visa denial
of a person they had invited to speak at a conference. 

at 762–765. And in Virginia Bd. of Pharmacy v. Virginia
Citizens Consumer Council, Inc., we concluded that pre-
scription-drug consumers had an interest in challenging
the prohibition on advertising the price of those drugs. 

, 756–757 (1976).
   Attempting to satisfy this requirement, the plaintiffs em-
phasize that hearing unfettered speech on social media is
critical to their work as scientists, pundits, and activists.
But they do not point to any specific instance of content
moderation that caused them identifiable harm. They have
therefore failed to establish an injury that is sufficiently
“concrete and particularized.” Lujan, 

.
   The state plaintiffs, claiming their own version of the
“right to listen” theory, assert a sovereign interest in hear-
ing from their citizens on social media. See 83 F. 4th, at
372–373. But this theory suffers from the same flaws as
the individual plaintiffs’ theory. The States have not iden-
tified any specific speakers or topics that they have been
unable to hear or follow.
   The States cite this supposed sovereign injury as a basis
for asserting third-party standing on behalf of “the citizens
they would listen to.” Brief for Respondents 30. But “[t]his
argument is a thinly veiled attempt to circumvent the lim-
its on parens patriae standing.” Brackeen, 

. Namely, States do not have “ ‘standing as parens pa-
triae to bring an action against the Federal Government.’ ”

.
   The States, like the individual plaintiffs, have failed to
establish a likelihood of standing.
                  Cite as: 

 (2024)                 29

                      Opinion of the Court

                          *     *     *
  The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their
injuries and the defendants’ conduct, ask us to conduct a
review of the years-long communications between dozens of
federal officials, across different agencies, with different so-
cial-media platforms, about different topics. This Court’s
standing doctrine prevents us from “exercis[ing such] gen-
eral legal oversight” of the other branches of Government.
TransUnion, 594 U. S., at 423–424. We therefore reverse
the judgment of the Fifth Circuit and remand the case for
further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

                                                   It is so ordered.
                  Cite as: 

 (2024)             1

                      ALITO, J., dissenting

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
                          _________________

                           No. 23–411
                          _________________


   VIVEK H. MURTHY, SURGEON GENERAL, ET AL.,
         PETITIONERS v. MISSOURI, ET AL.
 ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF
            APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT
                         [June 26, 2024]

   JUSTICE ALITO, with whom JUSTICE THOMAS and
JUSTICE GORSUCH join, dissenting.
   This case involves what the District Court termed “a far-
reaching and widespread censorship campaign” conducted
by high-ranking federal officials against Americans who ex-
pressed certain disfavored views about COVID–19 on social
media. Missouri v. Biden, 

, 729 (WD
La. 2023). Victims of the campaign perceived by the lower
courts brought this action to ensure that the Government
did not continue to coerce social media platforms to sup-
press speech. Among these victims were two States, whose
public health officials were hampered in their ability to
share their expertise with state residents; distinguished
professors of medicine at Stanford and Harvard; a professor
of psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine School
of Medicine; the owner and operator of a news website; and
Jill Hines, the director of a consumer and human rights ad-
vocacy organization. All these victims simply wanted to
speak out on a question of the utmost public importance.
   To protect their right to do so, the District Court issued a
preliminary injunction, App. 278–285, and the Court of Ap-
peals found ample evidence to support injunctive relief. See
Missouri v. Biden, 

 (CA5 2023).
   If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record
is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases
2                        MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                           ALITO, J., dissenting

to reach this Court in years. Freedom of speech serves
many valuable purposes, but its most important role is pro-
tection of speech that is essential to democratic self-govern-
ment, see Snyder v. Phelps, 

, 451–452 (2011),
and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge,
thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine,
history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts, see
United States v. Alvarez, 

 (2012) (ALITO,
J., dissenting).
   The speech at issue falls squarely into those categories.
It concerns the COVID–19 virus, which has killed more
than a million Americans.1 Our country’s response to the
COVID–19 pandemic was and remains a matter of enor-
mous medical, social, political, geopolitical, and economic
importance, and our dedication to a free marketplace of
ideas demands that dissenting views on such matters be al-
lowed. I assume that a fair portion of what social media
users had to say about COVID–19 and the pandemic was of
little lasting value. Some was undoubtedly untrue or mis-
leading, and some may have been downright dangerous.
But we now know that valuable speech was also sup-
pressed.2 That is what inevitably happens when entry to
——————
   1 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Deaths by Week and

State, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm (last ac-
cessed June 21, 2024).
   2 This includes information about the origin of the COVID–19 virus.

When the pandemic began, Facebook began demoting posts supporting
the theory that the virus leaked from a laboratory. See Interim Staff
Report of the House Judiciary Committee, The Censorship-Industrial
Complex: How Top Biden White House Officials Coerced Big Tech To
Censor Americans, True Information, and Critics of the Biden Admin-
istration, p. 398 (May 1, 2024) (Committee Report), https://judiciary.
house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-
document/Censorship-Industrial-Complex-WH-Report_Appendix.pdf. “In
February 2021, in response to . . . tense conversations with the new Ad-
ministration,” Facebook changed its policy to instead remove posts about
the lab leak theory wholesale. Ibid.; accord, id., at 463 (Facebook execu-
tive explained that the platform removed these posts “[b]ecause we were
                     Cite as: 

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                          ALITO, J., dissenting

the marketplace of ideas is restricted.
  Of course, purely private entities like newspapers are not
subject to the First Amendment, and as a result, they may
publish or decline to publish whatever they wish. But gov-
ernment officials may not coerce private entities to sup-
press speech, see National Rifle Association of America v.
Vullo, 

 (2024), and that is what happened in
this case.
  The record before us is vast. It contains evidence of com-
munications between many different government actors
and a variety of internet platforms, as well as evidence re-
garding the effects of those interactions on the seven differ-
ent plaintiffs. For present purposes, however, I will focus
on (a) just a few federal officials (namely, those who worked
either in the White House or the Surgeon General’s office),
(b) only one of the most influential social media platforms,
Facebook, and (c) just one plaintiff, Jill Hines, because if
any of the plaintiffs has standing, we are obligated to reach
the merits of this case. See Rumsfeld v. Forum for Aca-
demic and Institutional Rights, Inc., 

(2006).
  With the inquiry focused in this way, here is what the

——————
under pressure from the administration and others to do more and it was
part of the ‘more’ package”). But since then, both the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and the Department of Energy have found that the theory
is probably correct. See, e.g., A. Kaur & D. Diamond, FBI Director Says
Covid–19 “Most Likely” Originated From Lab Incident, Washington Post
(Feb. 28, 2023), https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/02/28/fbi-
director-christopher-wray-wuhan-lab; J. Herb & N. Bertrand, US Energy
Department Assesses Covid–19 Likely Resulted From Lab Leak, Fur-
thering US Intel Divide Over Virus Origin, CNN (Feb. 27, 2023),
https: // www.cnn.com / 2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan-china-
intelligence/index.html. Facebook reversed its policy, and Mark Zucker-
berg expressed regret that the platform had ever removed the posts:
“This seems like a good reminder that when we compromise our stand-
ards due to pressure from an administration in either direction, we’ll of-
ten regret it later.” Committee Report 398.
4                   MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                      ALITO, J., dissenting

record plainly shows. For months in 2021 and 2022, a cote-
rie of officials at the highest levels of the Federal Govern-
ment continuously harried and implicitly threatened Face-
book with potentially crippling consequences if it did not
comply with their wishes about the suppression of certain
COVID–19-related speech. Not surprisingly, Facebook re-
peatedly yielded. As a result Hines was indisputably in-
jured, and due to the officials’ continuing efforts, she was
threatened with more of the same when she brought suit.
These past and threatened future injuries were caused by
and traceable to censorship that the officials coerced, and
the injunctive relief she sought was an available and suita-
ble remedy. This evidence was more than sufficient to es-
tablish Hines’s standing to sue, see Lujan v. Defenders of
Wildlife, 

, 561–562 (1992), and consequently,
we are obligated to tackle the free speech issue that the case
presents. The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus
permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to
stand as an attractive model for future officials who want
to control what the people say, hear, and think.
  That is regrettable. What the officials did in this case
was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to
be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive.
And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even
more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the
country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.
Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will
get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with
enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message
this Court should send.
  In the next section of this opinion, I will recount in some
detail what was done by the officials in this case, but in con-
sidering the coercive impact of their conduct, two prominent
facts must be kept in mind.
  First, social media have become a leading source of news
                      Cite as: 

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                          ALITO, J., dissenting

for many Americans,3 and with the decline of other media,
their importance may grow.
   Second, internet platforms, although rich and powerful,
are at the same time far more vulnerable to Government
pressure than other news sources. If a President dislikes a
particular newspaper, he (fortunately) lacks the ability to
put the paper out of business. But for Facebook and many
other social media platforms, the situation is fundamen-
tally different. They are critically dependent on the protec-
tion provided by §230 of the Communications Decency Act
of 1996, 

, which shields them from civil lia-
bility for content they spread. They are vulnerable to anti-
trust actions; indeed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has
described a potential antitrust lawsuit as an “existential”
threat to his company.4 And because their substantial over-
seas operations may be subjected to tough regulation in the
European Union and other foreign jurisdictions, they rely
on the Federal Government’s diplomatic efforts to protect
their interests.
   For these and other reasons,5 internet platforms have a
powerful incentive to please important federal officials, and
the record in this case shows that high-ranking officials


——————
   3 See, e.g., J. Liedke & L. Wang, News Platform Fact Sheet, Pew Re-

search Center (Nov. 15, 2023), https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/
fact-sheet/news-platform-fact-sheet; A. Watson, Most Popular Platforms
for Daily News Consumption in the United States as of August 2022, by
Age Group, Statista (Jan. 4, 2024), https://www.statista.com/statis-
tics/717651/most-popular-news-platforms.
   4 C. Newton, Read the Full Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Leaked

Internal Facebook Meetings, The Verge (Oct. 1, 2019), https://www.
theverge.com/2019/10/1/20892354/mark-zuckerberg-full-transcript-leaked-
facebook-meetings.
   5 For pending or potential legislation affecting internet platforms, see

Congressional Research Service, C. Cho, L. Zhu, & K. Busch, Defining
and Regulating Online Platforms (Aug. 25, 2023), https://crsreports.con-
gress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47662/11.
6                     MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                        ALITO, J., dissenting

skillfully exploited Facebook’s vulnerability. When Face-
book did not heed their requests as quickly or as fully as the
officials wanted, the platform was publicly accused of “kill-
ing people” and subtly threatened with retaliation.
  Not surprisingly these efforts bore fruit. Facebook
adopted new rules that better conformed to the officials’
wishes, and many users who expressed disapproved views
about the pandemic or COVID–19 vaccines were “deplat-
formed” or otherwise injured.
                              I
                              A
  I begin by recounting the White House-led campaign to
coerce Facebook. The story starts in early 2021, when
White House officials began communicating with Facebook
about the spread of misinformation about COVID–19 on its
platform. Their emails started as questions, e.g., “Can you
also give us a sense of misinformation that might be falling
outside of your removal polices?” 10 Record 3397. But
when the White House did not get the results it wanted, its
questions quickly turned to virtual demands. And some-
times, those statements were paired with explicit refer-
ences to potential consequences.
  We may begin this account with an exchange that oc-
curred in March 2021, when the Washington Post reported
that Facebook was conducting a study that examined
whether posts on the platform questioning COVID–19’s se-
verity or the vaccines’ efficacy dissuaded some Americans
from being vaccinated.6 The study noted that Facebook’s
rules permitted some of this content to circulate. Rob Fla-
herty, the White House Director of Digital Strategy,
promptly emailed Facebook about the report. The subject
——————
   6 E. Dwoskin, Massive Facebook Study on Users’ Doubt in Vaccines

Finds a Small Group Appears To Play a Big Role in Pushing the Skepti-
cism, Washington Post (Mar. 14, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.
com/technology/2021/03/14/facebook-vaccine-hesitancy-qanon.
                  Cite as: 

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                       ALITO, J., dissenting

line of his email contained this accusation: “You are hiding
the ball.” 30 id., at 9366. Flaherty noted that the White
House was “gravely concerned that [Facebook] is one of the
top drivers of vaccine hesitancy,” and he demanded to know
how Facebook was trying to solve the problem. Id., at 9365.
In his words, “we want to know that you’re trying, we want
to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re
not playing a shell game with us when we ask you what is
going on.” Ibid.
   Andy Slavitt, the White House Senior Advisor for the
COVID–19 Response, chimed in with similar complaints.
“[R]elative to othe[r]” platforms, he said, “interactions with
Facebook are not straightforward” even though the misin-
formation problems there, in his view, were “worse.” Id., at
9364. According to Slavitt, the White House did not believe
that Facebook was “trying to solve the problem,” so he in-
formed Facebook that “[i]nternally we have been consider-
ing our options on what to do about it.” Ibid.
   Facebook responded apologetically to this and other mis-
sives. It acknowledged that “[w]e obviously have work to do
to gain your trust.” Id., at 9365. And after a follow-up con-
versation, the platform promised Flaherty and Slavitt that
it would adopt additional policies to “reduc[e] virality of vac-
cine hesitancy content.” Id., at 9369. In particular, Face-
book promised to “remove [any] Groups, Pages, and Ac-
counts”      that    “disproportionately      promot[e]      ...
sensationalized content” about the risks of vaccines, even
though it acknowledged that user stories about their expe-
riences and those of family members or friends were “ofte[n]
true.” Ibid. Facebook also promised to share additional
data with the White House, ibid., but Flaherty was not fully
satisfied. He said that the additional data Facebook offered
was not “going to get us the info we’re looking for,” but “it
shows to me that you at least understand the ask.” Id., at
9368.
   In April, Flaherty again demanded information on the
8                     MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                        ALITO, J., dissenting

“actions and changes” Facebook was taking “to ensure
you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem
worse.” Id., at 9371. To emphasize his urgency, Flaherty
likened COVID–19 misinformation to misinformation that
led to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Ibid. Facebook,
he charged, had helped to “increase skepticism” of the 2020
election, and he claimed that “an insurrection . . . was plot-
ted, in large part, on your platform.” Ibid. He added: “I
want some assurances, based in data, that you are not do-
ing the same thing again here.” Ibid. Facebook was sur-
prised by these remarks because it “thought we were doing
a better job” communicating with the White House, but it
promised to “more clearly respon[d]” in the future. Ibid.
   The next week, Facebook officers spoke with Slavitt and
Flaherty about reports of a rare blood clot caused by the
Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Id., at 9385. The conversation
quickly shifted when the White House noticed that one of
the most-viewed vaccine-related posts from the past week
was a Tucker Carlson video questioning the efficacy of the
Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Id., at 9376, 9388. Facebook
informed the White House that the video did not “qualify
for removal under our policies” and thus would be demoted
instead, ibid., but that answer did not please Flaherty.
“How was this not violative?” he queried, and “[w]hat ex-
actly is the rule for removal vs demoting?” Id., at 9387.
Then, for the second time in a week, he invoked the January
6 attack: “Not for nothing, but last time we did this dance,
it ended in an insurrection.” Id., at 9388. When Facebook
did not respond promptly, he made his demand more ex-
plicit: “These questions weren’t rhetorical.” Id., at 9387.
   If repeated accusations that Facebook aided an insurrec-
tion did not sufficiently convey the White House’s displeas-
ure, Flaherty and Slavitt made sure to do so by phone.7 In
——————
  7 Notes recounting these calls were released by the House Judiciary

Committee after the District Court entered the preliminary injunction
                      Cite as: 

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                          ALITO, J., dissenting

one call, both officials chided Facebook for not being
“straightforward” and not “play[ing] ball.” Committee Re-
port 141–142. Flaherty also informed Facebook that he was
reporting on the COVID–19 misinformation problem to the
President. Id., at 136.
   After a second call, a high-ranking Facebook executive
perceived that Slavitt was “outraged—not too strong a word
to describe his reaction”—that the platform had not re-
moved a fast-spreading meme suggesting that the vaccines
might cause harm. Id., at 295. The executive had “coun-
tered that removing content like that would represent a sig-
nificant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expres-
sion in the US,” but Slavitt was unmoved, in part because
he presumed that other platforms “would never accept
something like this.” Ibid.
   A few weeks later, White House Press Secretary Jen
Psaki was asked at a press conference about Facebook’s de-
cision to keep former President Donald Trump off the plat-
form. See Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki and
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack (May 5, 2021) (here-
inafter May 5 Press Briefing).8 Psaki deflected that ques-
tion but took the opportunity to call on platforms like Face-
book to “ ‘stop amplifying untrustworthy content . . . ,
especially related to COVID–19, vaccinations, and elec-
tions.’ ” 78 Record 25170. In the same breath, Psaki re-
minded the platforms that President Biden “ ‘supports . . . a
robust anti-trust program.’ ” Id., at 25171 (emphasis de-
leted); May 5 Press Briefing.
   Around this same time, Flaherty and Slavitt were in-
terrogating Facebook on the mechanics of its content-
moderation rules for COVID–19 misinformation. 30 Record
——————
and were published in a Committee Report. See Committee Report; Fed.
Rule Evid. 201.
   8 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2021/05/

05/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-and-secretary-of-agriculture
-tom-vilsack-may-5-2021.
10                  MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                     ALITO, J., dissenting

9391, 9397. Flaherty also forwarded to Facebook a
“COVID–19 Vaccine Misinformation Brief ” that had been
drafted by outside researchers and was “informing think-
ing” in the White House on what Facebook’s policies should
be. 52 id., at 16186. This document recommended that Fa-
cebook strengthen its efforts against misinformation in sev-
eral ways. It recommended the adoption of “progressively
severe penalties” for accounts that repeatedly posted mis-
information, and it proposed that Facebook make it harder
for users to find “anti-vaccine or vaccine-hesitant propa-
ganda” from other users. Ibid. Facebook declined to adopt
some of these suggestions immediately, but it did “se[t] up
more dedicated monitoring for [COVID] vaccine content”
and adopted a policy of “stronger demotions [for] a broader
set of content.” 30 id., at 9396.
  The White House responded with more questions. Ac-
knowledging that he sounded “like a broken record,” Fla-
herty interrogated Facebook about “how much content is
being demoted, and how effective [Facebook was] at miti-
gating reach, and how quickly.” Id., at 9395. Later, Fla-
herty chastised Facebook for failing to prevent some
vaccine-hesitant content from showing up through the plat-
form’s search function. Id., at 9400. “ ‘[R]emoving bad in-
formation from search’ is one of the easy, low-bar things you
guys do to make people like me think you’re taking action,”
he said. Id., at 9399. “If you’re not getting that right, it
raises even more questions about the higher bar stuff.”
Ibid. A few weeks after this latest round of haranguing,
Facebook expanded penalties for individual Facebook ac-
counts that repeatedly shared content that fact-checkers
deemed misinformation; henceforth, all of those individu-
als’ posts would show up less frequently in their friends’
news feeds. See 9 id., at 2697; Facebook, Taking Action
Against People Who Repeatedly Share Misinformation
                      Cite as: 

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                           ALITO, J., dissenting

(May 26, 2021).9
   Perhaps the most intense period of White House pressure
began a short time later. On July 15, Surgeon General Vi-
vek Murthy released an advisory titled “Confronting Health
Misinformation.” 78 Record 25171, 25173. Dr. Murthy sug-
gested, among other things, algorithmic changes to demote
misinformation and additional consequences for misinfor-
mation “ ‘super-spreaders.’ ” U. S. Public Health Service,
Confronting Health Misinformation: The U. S. Surgeon
General’s Advisory on Building a Healthy Information En-
vironment 12 (2021).10 Dr. Murthy also joined Psaki at a
press conference, where he asked the platforms to take
“much, much more . . . aggressive action” to combat
COVID–19 misinformation “because it’s costing people
their lives.” Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki
and Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy (July 15,
2021).11
   At the same press conference, Psaki singled out Facebook
as a primary driver of misinformation and asked the plat-
form to make several changes. Facebook “should provide,
publicly and transparently, data on the reach of COVID–19
[and] COVID vaccine misinformation.” Ibid. It “needs to
move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts.”
Ibid. And it should change its algorithm to promote “qual-
ity information sources.” Ibid. These recommendations
echoed Slavitt’s and Flaherty’s private demands from the
preceding months—as Psaki herself acknowledged. The
White House “engage[s] with [Facebook] regularly,” she
said, and Facebook “certainly understand[s] what our asks
——————
  9 https://about.fb.com/news/2021/05/taking-action-against-people-who-

repeatedly-share-misinformation.
  10 https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-misinformation-

advisory.pdf.
  11 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2021/07/

15/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-and-surgeon-general-dr-
vivek-h-murthy-july-15-2021.
12                     MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                         ALITO, J., dissenting

are.” Ibid. Apparently, the White House had not gotten
everything it wanted from those private conversations, so it
was turning up the heat in public.
   Facebook responded by telling the press that it had part-
nered with the White House to counter misinformation and
that it had “removed accounts that repeatedly break the
rules” and “more than 18 million pieces of COVID misinfor-
mation.” 78 Record 25174. But at another press briefing
the next day, Psaki said these efforts were “[c]learly not”
sufficient and expressed confidence that Facebook would
“make decisions about additional steps they can take.” See
id., at 25175; Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki
(July 16, 2021).12
   That same day, President Biden told reporters that social
media platforms were “ ‘killing people’ ” by allowing COVID-
related misinformation to circulate. 78 Record 25174,
25212. At oral argument, the Government suggested that
the President later disclaimed any desire to hold the plat-
forms accountable for misinformation, Tr. of Oral Arg. 34–
35, but that is not so. The President’s so-called clarification,
like many other statements by Government officials, called
on “ ‘Facebook’ ” to “ ‘do something about the misinfor-
mation’ ” on its platform. B. Klein, M. Vazquez, & K. Col-
lins, Biden Backs Away From His Claim That Facebook Is
‘Killing People’ by Allowing COVID Misinformation, CNN
(July 19, 2021).13
   And far from disclaiming potential regulatory action, the
White House confirmed that it had not “ ‘taken any options
off the table.’ ” Ibid. In fact, the day after the President’s
supposed clarification, the White House Communications
Director commended the President for “speak[ing] very ag-
gressively” and affirmed that platforms “certainly . . .
——————
  12 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2021/07/

16/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-july-16-2021.
  13 https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/19/politics/joe-biden-facebook/index

.html.
                  Cite as: 

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                      ALITO, J., dissenting

should be held accountable” for publishing misinformation.
61 Record 19400–19401. Indeed, she said that the White
House was “reviewing” whether §230 should be amended to
open the platforms to suit. Id., at 19400.
   Facebook responded quickly. The same day the President
made his “killing people” remark, the platform reached out
to Dr. Murthy to determine “the scope of what the White
House expects from us on misinformation going forward.” 9
id., at 2690. The next day, Facebook asked officials about
how to “get back to a good place” with the White House. 30
id., at 9403. And soon after, Facebook sent an email saying
that it “hear[d]” the officials’ “call for us to do more,” and
promptly assured the White House that it would comply. 9
id., at 2706. In spite of the White House’s inflammatory
rhetoric, Facebook at all times went out of its way to strike
a conciliatory tone. Only two days after the President’s re-
mark—and before his supposed clarification—Facebook as-
sured Dr. Murthy that, though “it’s not great to be accused
of killing people,” Facebook would “find a way to deescalate
and work together collaboratively.” Id., at 2713.
   Concrete changes followed in short order. In early Au-
gust, the Surgeon General’s Office reached out to Facebook
for “an update of any new/additional steps you are taking
with respect to health misinformation in light of ” the July
15 advisory. Id., at 2703. In response, Facebook informed
the Surgeon General that it would soon “expan[d] [its]
COVID policies to further reduce the spread of potentially
harmful content.” Id., at 2701.
   White House-Facebook conversations about misinfor-
mation did not end there. In September, the Wall Street
Journal wrote about the spread of misinformation on Face-
book, and Facebook preemptively reached out to the White
House to clarify. 8 id., at 2681. Flaherty asked (again) for
information on “how big the problem is, what solutions
you’re implementing, and how effective they’ve been.” Ibid.
14                    MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                        ALITO, J., dissenting

   Then in October, the Washington Post published yet an-
other story suggesting that Facebook knew more than it let
on about the spread of misinformation. Flaherty emailed
the link to Facebook with the subject line: “not even sure
what to say at this point.” Id., at 2676. And the Surgeon
General’s Office indicated both publically and privately
that it was disappointed in Facebook. See @Surgeon_Gen-
eral, X (Oct. 29, 2021) (accusing Facebook of “lacking . . .
transparency and accountability”);14 9 Record 2708. Face-
book offered to speak with both the White House and the
Surgeon General’s Office to assuage concerns. 8 id., at
2676.
   Interactions related to COVID–19 misinformation con-
tinued until at least June 2022. Id., at 2663. At that point,
Facebook proposed discontinuing its reports on misinfor-
mation, but assured the White House that it would be
“happy to continue, or to pick up at a later date, . . . if we
hear from you that this continues to be of value.” Ibid. Fla-
herty asked Facebook to continue reporting on misinfor-
mation because the Government was preparing to roll out
COVID–19 vaccines for children under five years old and,
“[o]bviously,” that rollout “ha[d] the potential to be just as
charged” as other vaccine-related controversies. Ibid. Fla-
herty added that he “[w]ould love to get a sense of what you
all are planning here,” and Facebook agreed to provide in-
formation for as long as necessary. Ibid.
   What these events show is that top federal officials con-
tinuously and persistently hectored Facebook to crack down
on what the officials saw as unhelpful social media posts,
including not only posts that they thought were false or
misleading but also stories that they did not claim to be lit-
erally false but nevertheless wanted obscured. See, e.g., 30
id., at 9361, 9365, 9369, 9385–9388. And Facebook’s reac-
tions to these efforts were not what one would expect from
——————
 14 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1454181191494606854.
                  Cite as: 

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                      ALITO, J., dissenting

an independent news source or a journalistic entity dedi-
cated to holding the Government accountable for its actions.
Instead, Facebook’s responses resembled that of a subser-
vient entity determined to stay in the good graces of a pow-
erful taskmaster. Facebook told White House officials that
it would “work . . . to gain your trust.” Id., at 9365. When
criticized, Facebook representatives whimpered that they
“thought we were doing a better job” but promised to do
more going forward. Id., at 9371. They pleaded to know
how they could “get back to a good place” with the White
House. Id., at 9403. And when denounced as “killing peo-
ple,” Facebook responded by expressing a desire to “work
together collaboratively” with its accuser. 9 id., at 2713; 78
id., at 25174. The picture is clear.
                              B
  While all this was going on, Jill Hines and others were
subjected to censorship. Hines serves as the co-director of
Health Freedom Louisiana, an organization that advocated
against vaccine and mask mandates during the pandemic.
Over the course of the pandemic—and while the White
House was pressuring Facebook—the platform repeatedly
censored Hines’s speech.
  For instance, in the summer and fall of 2021, Facebook
removed two groups that Hines had formed to discuss the
vaccine. 4 id., at 1313–1315. In January 2022, Facebook
restricted posts from Hines’s personal page “for 30 days . . .
for sharing the image of a display board used in a legislative
hearing that had Pfizer’s preclinical trial data on it.” Id., at
1313. In late May, Facebook restricted Hines for 90 days
for sharing an article about “increased emergency calls for
teens with myocarditis following [COVID] vaccination.”
Id., at 1313–1314. Hines’s public pages, Reopen Louisiana
and Health Freedom Louisiana, were subjected to similar
treatment. Facebook’s disciplinary actions meant that both
public pages suffered a drop in viewership; as Hines put it,
16                  MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                      ALITO, J., dissenting

“Each time you build viewership up [on a page], it is
knocked back down with each violation.” Id., at 1314. And
from February to April 2023, Facebook issued warnings and
violations for several vaccine-related posts shared on
Hines’s personal and public pages, including a post by Rob-
ert F. Kennedy, Jr., and an article entitled “ ‘Some Ameri-
cans Shouldn’t Get Another COVID-19 Vaccine Shot, FDA
Says.’ ” 78 id., at 25503–25506. The result was that “[n]o
one else was permitted to view or engage with the[se]
post[s].” Id., at 25503.
                              II
  Hines and the other plaintiffs in this case brought this
suit and asked for an injunction to stop the censorship cam-
paign just described. To maintain that suit, they needed to
show that they (1) were imminently threatened with an in-
jury in fact (2) that is traceable to the defendants and (3)
that could be redressed by the court. Lujan, 504 U. S., at
560–561; O’Shea v. Littleton, 

 (1974).
Hines satisfied all these requirements.
                              A
   Injury in fact. Because Hines sought and obtained a pre-
liminary injunction, it was not enough for her to show that
she had been injured in the past. Instead, she had to iden-
tify a “real and immediate threat of repeated injury” that
existed at the time she sued—that is, on August 2, 2022.
O’Shea, 

; see also Friends of the Earth, Inc.
v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc., 

 (2000); Mollan v. Torrance, 

(1824).
   The Government concedes that Hines suffered past in-
jury, but it claims that she did not make the showing
needed to obtain prospective relief. See Brief for Petitioners
17. Both the District Court and the Court of Appeals re-
jected this argument and found that Hines had shown that
                  Cite as: 

 (2024)           17

                      ALITO, J., dissenting

she was likely to be censored in the future. 680 F. Supp. 3d,
at 713; 83 F. 4th, at 368–369. We have previously examined
such findings under the “clearly erroneous” test. See Duke
Power Co. v. Carolina Environmental Study Group, Inc.,

 (1978). But no matter what test is applied,
the record clearly shows that Hines was still being censored
when she sued—and that the censorship continued thereaf-
ter. See supra, at 15–16. That was sufficient to establish
the type of injury needed to obtain injunctive relief. O’Shea,

; see also County of Riverside v. McLaugh-
lin, 

 (1991).
                              B
   Traceability. To sue the White House officials, Hines had
to identify a “causal connection” between the actions of
those officials and her censorship. Bennett v. Spear, 

 (1997). Hines did not need to prove that it
was only because of those officials’ conduct that she was
censored. Rather, as we held in Department of Commerce
v. New York, 

 (2019), it was enough for her to
show that one predictable effect of the officials’ action was
that Facebook would modify its censorship policies in a way
that affected her. 

.
   Hines easily met that test, and her traceability theory is
at least as strong as the State of New York’s in the Depart-
ment of Commerce case. There, the State claimed that it
would be hurt by a census question about citizenship. The
State predicted that the question would dissuade some
noncitizen households from complying with their legal duty
to complete the form, and it asserted that this in turn could
cause the State to lose a seat in the House of Representa-
tives, as well as federal funds that are distributed on the
basis of population. 

 at 766–767. Although this theory
depended on illegal conduct by third parties and an attenu-
ated chain of causation, the Court found that the State had
established traceability. It was enough, the Court held,
18                      MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                          ALITO, J., dissenting

that the failure of some aliens to respond to the census was
“likely attributable” to the Government’s introduction of a
citizenship question. 

.
   This is not a demanding standard, and Hines made the
requisite showing—with room to spare. Recall that officials
from the White House and Surgeon General’s Office repeat-
edly hectored and implicitly threatened Facebook to sup-
press speech expressing the viewpoint that Hines espoused.
See supra, at 6–15. Censorship of Hines was the “predicta-
ble effect” of these efforts. Department of Commerce, 

. Or, to put the point in different terms, Face-
book would “likely react in predictable ways” to this unre-
lenting pressure. 

   This alone was sufficient to show traceability, but here
there is even more direct proof. On numerous occasions,
the White House officials successfully pushed Facebook to
tighten its censorship policies, see supra, at 7, 10, 13, and
those policies had implications for Hines.15 First, in March


——————
  15 The Court discounts this evidence because Hines did not draw the

same links in her briefing. See ante, at 20, n. 7. But we have an “inde-
pendent obligation” to assess standing, Summers v. Earth Island Insti-
tute, 

 (2009), and a “virtually unflagging obligation” to
exercise our jurisdiction if standing exists, Colorado River Water Conser-
vation Dist. v. United States, 

 (1976). “[A] case like
this one, where the record spans over 26,000 pages” and the plaintiffs
have provided numerous facts, deserves some scrutiny before we simply
brush standing aside. Ante, at 20, n. 7.
  As it happens, Hines has said enough to establish standing. First, she
says that, at the behest of the White House, Facebook announced new
measures to combat misinformation about COVID–19 and the vaccines.
Second, she says that her Facebook pages fell under those policies.
Third, she says that she suffered the penalties imposed by Facebook,
such as demotion of her posts and pages. See 4 Record 1315; 78 id., at
25503. She may not explicitly say that the policy changes caused the
penalties she experienced. But what theory makes more sense—that a
user falling within Facebook’s amended policies was censored under
those policies or that something else caused her injury?
                 Cite as: 

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                     ALITO, J., dissenting

2021, the White House pressured Facebook into implement-
ing a policy of removing accounts that “disproportionately
promot[e] . . . sensationalized content” about vaccines. Su-
pra, at 7. Later that year, Facebook removed two of Hines’s
groups, which posted about vaccines. Supra, at 15. And
when Hines sued in August 2022, she reported that her per-
sonal page was “currently restricted” for sharing vaccine-
related content and, thus, that she was “under constant
threat of being completely deplatformed.” 4 Record 1314.
  Second, in May, Facebook told Slavitt that it would “se[t]
up more dedicated monitoring” of vaccine content and apply
demotions to “a broader set of content.” Supra, at 10. Then,
a few weeks later, Facebook also increased demotions of
posts by individual Facebook accounts that repeatedly
shared misinformation. Ibid. Hines says that she was re-
peatedly fact-checked for posting about the vaccines, see su-
pra, at 15–16; 4 Record 1314, so these policy changes ap-
parently increased the risk that posts from her personal
account would have been hidden from her friends’ Facebook
feeds.
  Third, in response to the July 2021 comments from the
White House and the Surgeon General, Facebook made
more changes. Supra, at 13. And from the details Hines
provides about her posting history, this policy change would
have affected her. For one thing, Facebook “rendered ‘non-
recommendable’ ” any page linked to another account that
had been “removed” for spreading misinformation about
COVID–19. 9 Record 2701. Hines says that two of her
groups were removed for alleged COVID misinformation
around this time. Supra, at 15; 4 Record 1315. So under
the new policy, her other pages would apparently be non-
recommendable. Perhaps for this reason, though Hines at-
tempted to convince members of her deplatformed group to
migrate to a substitute group, only about a quarter of its
membership made the move before the substitute group too
was removed. Ibid.
20                  MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                      ALITO, J., dissenting

   For another, Facebook “increas[ed] the strength of [its]
demotions for COVID and vaccine-related content that
third party fact checkers rate[d] as ‘Partly False’ or ‘Missing
Context.’ ” 9 id., at 2701. And Facebook “ma[de] it easier
to have Pages/Groups/Accounts demoted for sharing
COVID and vaccine-related misinformation by . . . counting
content removals” under Facebook’s COVID–19 policies “to-
wards their demotion threshold.” Ibid. Under this new pol-
icy, Facebook would now consider Hines’s “numerous” com-
munity standards violations, 4 id., at 1314, when
determining whether to make her posts less accessible to
other users. So, for instance, when Hines received several
citations in early 2023, this amendment would have gov-
erned Facebook’s decision to “downgrad[e] the visibility of
[her] posts in Facebook’s News Feed (thereby limiting its
reach to other users).” 78 id., at 25503. The record here
amply shows traceability.
   The Court reaches the opposite conclusion by applying a
new and heightened standard. The Court notes that Face-
book began censoring COVID–19-related misinformation
before officials from the White House and the Surgeon Gen-
eral’s Office got involved. Ante, at 20; see also Brief for Pe-
titioners 18. And in the Court’s view, that fact makes it
difficult to untangle Government-caused censorship from
censorship that Facebook might have undertaken anyway.
See ante, at 20. That may be so, but in the Department of
Commerce census case, it also would have been difficult for
New York to determine which noncitizen households failed
to respond to the census because of a citizenship question
and which had other reasons. Nevertheless, the Court did
not require New York to perform that essentially impossi-
ble operation because it was clear that a citizenship ques-
tion would dissuade at least some noncitizen households
from responding. As we explained, “Article III ‘requires no
more than de facto causality,’ ” so a showing that a citizen-
ship question affected some aliens sufficed. Department of
                     Cite as: 

 (2024)                   21

                          ALITO, J., dissenting

Commerce, 

.
   Here, it is reasonable to infer (indeed, the inference leaps
out from the record) that the efforts of the federal officials
affected at least some of Facebook’s decisions to censor
Hines. All of Facebook’s demotion, content-removal, and
deplatforming decisions are governed by its policies.16 So
when the White House pressured Facebook to amend some
of the policies related to speech in which Hines engaged,
those amendments necessarily impacted some of Face-
book’s censorship decisions. Nothing more is needed. What
the Court seems to want are a series of ironclad links—from
a particular coercive communication to a particular change
in Facebook’s rules or practice and then to a particular ad-
verse action against Hines. No such chain was required in
the Department of Commerce case, and neither should one
be demanded here.
   In addition to this heightened linkage requirement, the
Court argues that Hines lacks standing because the threat
of future injury dissipated at some point during summer
2022 when the officials’ pressure campaign tapered off.
Ante, at 25, n. 10. But this argument errs in two critical
respects. First, the effects of the changes the officials co-
erced persisted. Those changes controlled censorship deci-
sions before and after Hines sued.
   Second, the White House threats did not come with expi-
ration dates, and it would be silly to assume that the
threats lost their force merely because White House offi-
cials opted not to renew them on a regular basis. Indeed,
the record suggests that Facebook did not feel free to chart
its own course when Hines sued; rather, the platform had
promised to continue reporting to the White House and re-
main responsive to its concerns for as long as the officials
requested. Supra, at 14.
——————
  16 See Meta, Policies, https://transparency.meta.com/policies (last ac-

cessed June 19, 2024).
22                  MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                      ALITO, J., dissenting

  In short, when Hines sued in August 2022, there was still
a link between the White House and the injuries she was
presently suffering and could reasonably expect to suffer in
the future. That is enough for traceability.
                               C
   Redressability. Finally, Hines was required to show that
the threat of future injury she faced when the complaint
was filed “likely would be redressed” by injunctive relief.
FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, 

 (2024). This required proof that a preliminary injunc-
tion would reduce Hines’s “risk of [future] harm . . . to some
extent.” Massachusetts v. EPA, 

 (2007)
(emphasis added). And as we recently explained, “[t]he sec-
ond and third standing requirements—causation and re-
dressability—are often ‘flip sides of the same coin.’ ” Alli-
ance for Hippocratic Medicine, 

. Therefore,
“[i]f a defendant’s action causes an injury, enjoining the ac-
tion or awarding damages for the action will typically re-
dress that injury.” 

.
   Hines easily satisfied that requirement. For the reasons
just explained, there is ample proof that Hines’s past inju-
ries were a “predictable effect” of the Government’s censor-
ship campaign, and the preliminary injunction was likely to
prevent the continuation of the harm to at least “some ex-
tent.” Massachusetts v. EPA, 

.
   The Court disagrees because Facebook “remain[s] free to
enforce . . . even those [policies] tainted by initial govern-
mental coercion.” Ante, at 26. But as with traceability, the
Court applies a new and elevated standard for redressabil-
ity, which has never required plaintiffs to be “certain” that
a court order would prevent future harm. Larson v.
Valente, 

, 243–244, n. 15 (1982). In Massachu-
setts v. EPA, for example, no one could say that the relief
sought—reconsideration by the EPA of its decision not to
regulate the emission of greenhouse gases—would actually
                   Cite as: 

 (2024)              23

                       ALITO, J., dissenting

remedy the Commonwealth’s alleged injuries, such as the
loss of land due to rising sea levels. The Court’s decision
did not prevent the EPA from adhering to its prior decision,
549 U. S., at 534–535, and there was no way to know with
any degree of certainty that any greenhouse gas regulations
that the EPA might eventually issue would prevent the
oceans from rising. Yet the Court found that the redressa-
bility requirement was met.
   Similarly, in Department of Commerce, no one could say
with any certainty that our decision barring a censorship
question from the 2020 census questionnaire would prevent
New York from losing a seat in the House of Representa-
tives, 

, and in fact that result occurred de-
spite our decision. S. Goldmacher, New York Loses House
Seat After Coming Up 89 People Short on Census, N. Y.
Times, Apr. 26, 2021.17
   As we recently proclaimed in FDA v. Alliance for Hippo-
cratic Medicine, Article III standing is an important compo-
nent of our Constitution’s structural design. See 602 U. S.,
at 378–380. That doctrine is cheapened when the rules are
not evenhandedly applied.
                         *    *    *
  Hines showed that, when she sued, Facebook was censor-
ing her COVID-related posts and groups. And because the
White House prompted Facebook to amend its censorship
policies, Hines’s censorship was, at least in part, caused by
the White House and could be redressed by an injunction
against the continuation of that conduct. For these reasons,
Hines met all the requirements for Article III standing.
                           III
  I proceed now to the merits of Hines’s First Amendment

——————
  17 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/nyregion/new-york-census-

congress.html.
24                      MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                          ALITO, J., dissenting

claim.18 Government efforts to “dictat[e] the subjects about
which persons may speak,” First Nat. Bank of Boston v. Bel-
lotti, 

, 784–785 (1978), or to suppress protected
speech are “ ‘presumptively unconstitutional,’ ” Rosenberger
v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va., 

(1995). And that is so regardless of whether the Govern-
ment carries out the censorship itself or uses a third party
“ ‘to accomplish what . . . is constitutionally forbidden.’ ”
Norwood v. Harrison, 

 (1973).
    As the Court held more than 60 years ago in Bantam
Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 

 (1963), the Government
may not coerce or intimidate a third-party intermediary
into suppressing someone else’s speech. 

. Earlier
this Term, we reaffirmed that important principle in Na-
tional Rifle Association v. Vullo, 602 U. S., at 187–191. As
we said there, “a government official cannot do indirectly
what she is barred from doing directly,” 

, and
while an official may forcefully attempt to persuade,
“[w]hat she cannot do . . . is use the power of the State to
punish or suppress disfavored expression,” 

.
    In Vullo, the alleged conduct was blunt. The head of the
state commission with regulatory authority over insurance
companies allegedly told executives at Lloyd’s directly and
in no uncertain terms that she would be “ ‘less interested’ ”
in punishing the company’s regulatory infractions if it
ceased doing business with the National Rifle Association.

. The federal officials’ conduct here was more

——————
  18 To obtain a preliminary injunction, Hines was required to establish

that she is likely to succeed on the merits, that she would otherwise suf-
fer irreparable harm, and that the equities cut in her favor. Winter v.
Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 

 (2008). In a First
Amendment case, the equities are bound up in the merits. See Elrod v.
Burns, 

 (1976) (plurality opinion) (“The loss of First
Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably
constitutes irreparable injury”). So I focus on Hines’s likelihood of suc-
cess.
                    Cite as: 

 (2024)               25

                        ALITO, J., dissenting

subtle and sophisticated. The message was delivered piece-
meal by various officials over a period of time in the form of
aggressive questions, complaints, insistent requests, de-
mands, and thinly veiled threats of potentially fatal repris-
als. But the message was unmistakable, and it was duly
received.
   The principle recognized in Bantam Books and Vullo re-
quires a court to distinguish between permissible persua-
sion and unconstitutional coercion, and in Vullo, we looked
to three leading factors that are helpful in making that de-
termination: (1) the authority of the government officials
who are alleged to have engaged in coercion, (2) the nature
of statements made by those officials, and (3) the reactions
of the third party alleged to have been coerced. 602 U. S.,
at 189–190, and n. 4, 191–194. In this case, all three factors
point to coercion.
                              A
  I begin with the authority of the relevant officials—high-
ranking White House officials and the Surgeon General.
High-ranking White House officials presumably speak for
and may have the ability to influence the President, and as
discussed earlier, a Presidential administration has the
power to inflict potentially fatal damage to social media
platforms like Facebook. See supra, at 5. Facebook appre-
ciates what the White House could do, and President Biden
has spoken openly about that power—as he has every right
to do. For instance, he has declared that the “policy of [his]
Administration [is] to enforce the antitrust laws to meet the
challenges posed by . . . the rise of the dominant Internet
platforms,” and he has directed the Attorney General and
other agency heads to “enforce the antitrust laws . . . vigor-
ously.” Promoting Competition in the American Economy,
Executive Order No. 14036, 3 CFR 609 (2021).19 He has
——————
  19 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/

2021/07/09/executive-order-on-promoting-competition-in-the-american-
26                     MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                         ALITO, J., dissenting

also floated the idea of amending or repealing §230 of the
Communications Decency Act. See, e.g., B. Klein, White
House Reviewing Section 230 Amid Efforts To Push Social
Media Giants To Crack Down on Misinformation, CNN
(July 20, 2021) 20; R. Kern, White House Renews Call To
‘Remove’ Section 230 Liability Shield, Politico (Sept. 8,
2022).21
   Previous administrations have also wielded significant
power over Facebook. In a data-privacy case brought jointly
by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Com-
mission, Facebook was required “to pay an unprecedented
$5 billion civil penalty,” which is “among the largest civil
penalties ever obtained by the federal government.” Press
Release, Dept. of Justice, Facebook Agrees To Pay $5 Bil-
lion and Implement Robust New Protections of User Infor-
mation in Settlement of Data-Privacy Claims (July 24,
2019).22
   A matter that may well have been prominent in Face-
book’s thinking during the period in question in this case
was a dispute between the United States and the European
Union over international data transfers. In 2020, the Court
of Justice of the European Union invalidated the mecha-
nism for transferring data between the European Union
and United States because it did not sufficiently protect EU
citizens from Federal Government surveillance. Data Pro-
tection Comm’r v. Facebook Ireland Limited, Case C–311/18
(2020). The EU-U. S. conflict over data privacy hindered
Facebook’s international operations, but Facebook could


——————
economy.
  20 https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/20/politics/white-house-section-230-

facebook/index.html.
  21 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/08/white-house-renews-call-

to-remove-section-230-liability-shield-00055771.
  22 https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/facebook-agrees-pay-5-billion-and-

implement-robust-new-protections-user-information.
                     Cite as: 

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                          ALITO, J., dissenting

not “resolve [the conflict] on its own.” N. Clegg & J. New-
stead, Our Response to the Decision on Facebook’s EU-US
Data Transfers, Meta (May 22, 2023).23 Rather, the plat-
form relied on the White House to negotiate an agreement
that would preserve its ability to maintain its trans-Atlan-
tic operations. K. Mackrael, EU Approves Data-Transfer
Deal With U. S., Averting Potential Halt in Flows, Wall
Street Journal, July 10, 2023.24
   It is therefore beyond any serious dispute that the top-
ranking White House officials and the Surgeon General
possessed the authority to exert enormous coercive pres-
sure.
                                B
                                 1
   Second, I turn to of the officials’ communications with Fa-
cebook, which possess all the hallmarks of coercion that we
identified in Bantam Books and Vullo. Many of the White
House’s emails were “phrased virtually as orders,” Bantam
Books, 

, and the officials’ frequent follow-ups
ensured that they were understood as such, 

. To
take a few examples, after Flaherty read an article about
content causing vaccine hesitancy, he demanded “to know
that [Facebook was] trying” to combat the issue and “to
know that you’re not playing a shell game with us when we
ask you what is going on.” 30 Record 9365; see supra, at 7.
The next month, he requested “assurances, based in data,”
that Facebook was not “making our country’s vaccine hesi-
tancy problem worse.” 30 Record 9371; see supra, at 7–8.
A week after that, he questioned Facebook about its policies
“for removal vs demoting,” and when the platform did not

——————
  23 https://about.fb.com/news/2023/05/our-response-to-the-decision-on-

facebooks-eu-us-data-transfers.
  24 https://www.wsj.com/articles/eu-approves-data-transfer-deal-with-

u-s-averting-potential-halt-in-flows-7a149c9.
28                  MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                     ALITO, J., dissenting

promptly respond, he added: “These questions weren’t rhe-
torical.” 30 Record 9387; see supra, at 8. When Facebook
provided the White House with some data it asked for, Fla-
herty thanked Facebook for demonstrating “that you at
least understand the ask.” 30 Record 9368; see supra, at 7.
    Various comments during the July pressure campaign
likewise reveal that the White House and the Surgeon Gen-
eral’s Office expected compliance. At the press conference
announcing the Surgeon General’s recommendations re-
lated to misinformation, Psaki noted that the White House
“engage[s] with [Facebook] regularly,” and Facebook “cer-
tainly understand[s] what our asks are.” Supra, at 11. The
next day, she expressed confidence that Facebook would
“make decisions about additional steps they can take.” 78
Record 25175; see supra, at 12. And eventually, the Sur-
geon General’s Office prompted Facebook for “an update of
any new/additional steps you are taking with respect to
health misinformation in light of ” the July 15 advisory. 9
Record 2703; see supra, at 13.
    These demands were coupled with “thinly veiled threats”
of legal consequences. Bantam Books, 

.
Three instances stand out. Early on, when the White House
first expressed skepticism that Facebook was effectively
combatting misinformation, Slavitt informed the platform
that the White House was “considering our options on what
to do about it.” 30 Record 9364; see supra, at 7. In other
words, if Facebook did not “solve” its “misinformation” prob-
lem, the White House might unsheathe its potent authority.
30 Record 9364.
    The threat was made more explicit in May, when Psaki
paired a request for platforms to “ ‘stop amplifying untrust-
worthy content’ ” with a reminder that President Biden
“ ‘supports . . . a robust anti-trust program.’ ” 78 id., at
25170–25171 (emphasis deleted); May 5 Press Briefing; see
also supra, at 9. The Government casts this reference to
legal consequences as a defense of individual Americans
                   Cite as: 

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                        ALITO, J., dissenting

against censorship by the platforms. See Reply Brief 9. But
Psaki’s full answer undermines that interpretation. Imme-
diately after noting President Biden’s support for antitrust
enforcement, Psaki added, “So his view is that there’s more
that needs to be done to ensure that this type of . . . life-
threatening information is not going out to the American
public.” May 5 Press Briefing. The natural interpretation
is that the White House might retaliate if the platforms al-
lowed free speech, not if they suppressed it.
   Finally, in July, the White House asserted that the plat-
forms “should be held accountable” for publishing misinfor-
mation. 61 Record 19400; see supra, at 11–13. The totality
of this record—constant haranguing, dozens of demands for
compliance, and references to potential consequences—
evince “a scheme of state censorship.” Bantam Books, 

.
                                  2
   The Government tries to spin these interactions as fairly
benign. In its telling, Flaherty, Slavitt, and other officials
merely “asked the platforms for information” and then
“publicly and privately criticized the platforms for what the
officials perceived as a . . . failure to live up to the platforms’
commitments.” Brief for Petitioners 31. References to con-
sequences, the Government claims, were “fleeting and gen-
eral” and “cannot plausibly be characterized as coercive
threats.” Id., at 32.
   This characterization is not true to what happened. Slav-
itt and Flaherty did not simply ask Facebook for infor-
mation. They browbeat the platform for months and made
it clear that if it did not do more to combat what they saw
as misinformation, it might be called to account for its
shortcomings. And as for the supposedly “fleeting” nature
of the numerous references to potential consequences,
death threats can be very effective even if they are not de-
livered every day.
30                     MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                         ALITO, J., dissenting

   The Government also defends the officials’ actions on the
ground that “[t]he President and his senior aides are enti-
tled to speak out on such matters of pressing public con-
cern.” Reply Brief 11. According to the Government, the
officials were simply using the President’s “bully pulpit” to
“inform, persuade, and protect the public.” Brief for Peti-
tioners 5, 24.
   This argument introduces a new understanding of the
term “bully pulpit,” which was coined by President Theo-
dore Roosevelt to denote a President’s excellent (i.e.,
“bully” 25) position (i.e., his “pulpit”) to persuade the pub-
lic.26 But Flaherty, Slavitt, and other officials who emailed
and telephoned Facebook were not speaking to the public
from a figurative pulpit. On the contrary, they were en-
gaged in a covert scheme of censorship that came to light
only after the plaintiffs demanded their emails in discovery
and a congressional Committee obtained them by sub-
poena. See Committee Report 1–2. If these communica-
tions represented the exercise of the bully pulpit, then eve-
rything that top federal officials say behind closed doors to
any private citizen must also represent the exercise of the
President’s bully pulpit. That stretches the concept beyond
the breaking point.
   In any event, the Government is hard-pressed to find any
prior example of the use of the bully pulpit to threaten cen-
sorship of private speech. The Government cites four in-
stances in which past Presidents commented publicly about
the performance of the media. President Reagan lauded the
media for “tough reporting” on drugs. Reagan Presidential
Library & Museum, Remarks to Media Executives at a

——————
  25 Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language 191

(1902).
  26 See D. Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William

Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, pp. xi–xii (2013) (Good-
win).
                     Cite as: 

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                          ALITO, J., dissenting

White House Briefing on Drug Abuse (Mar. 7, 1988).27 But
he never threatened to do anything to media outlets that
were soft on the issue of drugs. President Theodore Roose-
velt “lambasted ‘muck-raking’ journalists” as “ ‘one of the
most potent forces for evil’ ” and encouraged journalists to
speak truth, rather than slander. Brief for Petitioners 24
(quoting The American Presidency Project, Remarks at the
Laying of the Cornerstone of the Office Building of the
House of Representatives (Apr. 14, 1906)).28 But his com-
ment did not threaten any action against the muckrakers,
see Goodwin 480–487, and it is unclear what he could have
done to them. President George W. Bush denounced por-
nography as “debilitating” for “communities, marriages,
families, and children.”         Presidential Proclamation
No. 7725, 3 CFR 129 (2003 Comp.). But he never threat-
ened to take action against pornography that was not “ob-
scene” within the meaning of our precedents.
  The Government’s last example is a 1915 speech in which
President Wilson deplored false reporting that the Japa-
nese were using Turtle Bay, California, as a naval base.
The American Presidency Project, Address at the Associ-
ated Press Luncheon in New York City (Apr. 20, 1915).29
Speaking to a gathering of reporters, President Wilson pro-
claimed: “We ought not to permit that sort of thing to use
up the electrical energy of the [telegraph] wires, because its
energy is malign, its energy is not of the truth, its energy is
mischief.” Ibid. Wilson’s comment is best understood as
metaphorical and hortatory, not as a legal threat. And in
any event, it is hard to see how he could have brought about
censorship of telegraph companies because the Mann-
——————
  27 https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-media-ex

ecutives-white-house-briefing-drug-abuse.
  28 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-laying-

the-cornerstone-the-office-building-the-house-representatives-the-man.
  29 https: // www.presidency.ucsb.edu / documents/address-the-associated-

press-luncheon-new-york-city.
32                  MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                     ALITO, J., dissenting

Elkins Act, enacted in 1910, deemed them to be common
carriers, and that meant that they were obligated to trans-
mit all messages regardless of content. See 36 Stat. 544–
545; T. Wu, A Brief History of American Telecommunica-
tions Regulation, in 5 Oxford International Encyclopedia of
Legal History 95 (2007). Thus, none of these examples jus-
tifies the conduct at issue here.
                               C
  Finally, Facebook’s responses to the officials’ persistent
inquiries, criticisms, and threats show that the platform
perceived the statements as something more than mere rec-
ommendations. Time and time again, Facebook responded
to an angry White House with a promise to do better in the
future. In March, Facebook attempted to assuage the
White House by acknowledging “[w]e obviously have work
to do to gain your trust.” 30 Record 9365. In April, Face-
book promised to “more clearly respon[d] to [White House]
questions.” Id., at 9371. In May, Facebook “committed to
addressing the defensive work around misinformation that
you’ve called on us to address.” 9 id., at 2698. In July, Fa-
cebook reached out to the Surgeon General after “the Pres-
ident’s remarks about us” and emphasized its efforts “to
better understand the scope of what the White House ex-
pects from us on misinformation going forward.” Id., at
2690. And of course, as we have seen, Facebook repeatedly
changed its policies to better address the White House’s
concerns. See supra, at 7, 10, 13.
  The Government’s primary response is that Facebook oc-
casionally declined to take its suggestions. Reply Brief 11;
see, e.g., supra, at 10. The implication is that Facebook
must have chosen to undertake all of its anti-misinfor-
mation efforts entirely of its own accord.
  That is bad logic, and in any event, the record shows oth-
erwise. It is true that Facebook voluntarily undertook some
anti-misinformation efforts and that it declined to make
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 (2024)            33

                      ALITO, J., dissenting

some requested policy changes. But the interactions re-
counted above unmistakably show that the White House
was insistent that Facebook should do more than it was do-
ing on its own, see, e.g., supra, at 11–12, and Facebook re-
peatedly yielded—even if it did not always give the White
House everything it wanted.
   Internal Facebook emails paint a clear picture of subser-
vience. The platform quickly realized that its “handling of
[COVID] misinformation” was “importan[t]” to the White
House, so it looked for ways “to be viewed as a trusted,
transparent partner” and “avoid . . . public spat[s].” Com-
mittee Report 181, 184, 188. After the White House blamed
Facebook for aiding an insurrection, the platform realized
that it was at a “crossroads . . . with the White House.” Id.,
at 294. “Given what is at stake here,” one Facebook em-
ployee proposed reevaluating the company’s “internal
methods” to “see what further steps we may/may not be able
to take.” Id., at 295. This reevaluation led to one of Face-
book’s policy changes. See supra, at 8–10.
   Facebook again took stock of its relationship with the
White House after the President’s accusation that it was
“killing people.” Internally, Facebook saw little merit in
many of the White House’s critiques. One employee labeled
the White House’s understanding of misinformation “com-
pletely unclear” and speculated that “it’s convenient for
them to blame us” “when the vaccination campaign isn’t go-
ing as hoped.” Committee Report 473. Nonetheless, Face-
book figured that its “current course” of “in effect explaining
ourselves more fully, but not shifting on where we draw the
lines,” is “a recipe for protracted and increasing acrimony
with the [White House].” Id., at 573. “Given the bigger fish
we have to fry with the Administration,” such as the EU-
U. S. dispute over “data flows,” that did not “seem like a
great place” for Facebook-White House relations “to be.”
Ibid. So the platform was motivated to “explore some
moves that we can make to show that we are trying to be
34                  MURTHY v. MISSOURI

                      ALITO, J., dissenting

responsive.” Ibid. That brainstorming resulted in the Au-
gust 2021 rule changes. See supra, at 13, 19–20.
   In sum, the officials wielded potent authority. Their com-
munications with Facebook were virtual demands. And Fa-
cebook’s quavering responses to those demands show that
it felt a strong need to yield.
   For these reasons, I would hold that Hines is likely to pre-
vail on her claim that the White House coerced Facebook
into censoring her speech.
                        *      *    *
  For months, high-ranking Government officials placed
unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’
free speech. Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to ad-
dress this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respect-
fully dissent.