• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, June 30, 2025

The Supreme Court on Monday left in place a ruling that threw out “censorship” claims by the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children's Health Defense -- an organization founded and formerly led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

As is typical, the court didn't give a reason for its decision to turn away the organization.

The move ends a legal battle dating to 2020, when Children's Health Defense claimed its posts and a fundraising tool were wrongly suppressed by Meta.

The organization claimed Meta violated the First Amendment, arguing that the platform was a “state actor” -- meaning equivalent to the government -- when it took steps to prevent the spread of the group's posts.

The First Amendment generally prohibits the government -- not private companies -- from suppressing speech, but there's an exception that applies when private companies are “state actors.”

Children's Health Defense proposed several theories to support its claim that Meta was a “state actor,” including that Facebook and the government allegedly worked together to suppress speech, and that Facebook allegedly changed its vaccine-related policies due to “coercion” by lawmakers.

U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston in the Northern District of California dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that even if the Children's Health Defense's allegations were proven true, they wouldn't show that the government coerced Facebook.

The organization then appealed to the 9th Circuit, which ruled 2-1 for Meta.

“Meta has a First Amendment right to use its platform to promote views it finds congenial and to refrain from promoting views it finds distasteful,” 9th Circuit Court Judge Eric Miller, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote last year in an opinion joined by U.S. District Court Judge Edward Korman.

Circuit Judge Daniel Collins, also a Trump appointee, dissented, writing that he would have allowed the Children's Health Defense to pursue a request for an injunction against Meta.

In January, the Children's Health Defense petitioned the Supreme Court to review that ruling. The group noted in its request that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that the company faced “massive institutional pressure to basically start censoring content on ideological grounds.”

Meta countered that Zuckerberg has also said the company made its own decisions regarding content.

The company pointed to Zuckerberg's August 26, 2024 letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), which said: “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down.”