Universities Don’t Become ‘State Actors’ Just by Talking to the Government, Says Stanford

Private research universities like Stanford and their researchers aren’t “state actors” subject to constitutional constraints “just because they speak to the government about their research,” said Stanford’s Dec. 26 amicus brief at the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the petitioners in Murthy v. Missouri (docket 23-411) who seek to vacate the 5th Circuit’s injunction against government involvement in social media content moderation.

Stanford wasn’t named a defendant in the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit that gave rise to the district court’s imposition of an injunction barring officials from the White House and four federal agencies from conversing with social media platforms about their content moderation, said the brief. But assertions about the conduct of Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) researchers and Stanford students appear throughout the underlying complaint, it said.

The complaint alleges that Stanford personnel “conspired with federal officials to censor speech on social media,” said the brief. Stanford researchers and students also figured prominently in the district court’s preliminary injunction decision, it said.

The injunction barred the government from working in tandem with the SIO and its Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project toward social media content moderation, said the brief. On appeal, the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals “correctly vacated” that provision of the district court’s injunction, it said. It held that the injunction may implicate private, third-party actors that aren’t parties in the case and that may be entitled to their own First Amendment protections, it said.

The underlying Stanford research, plus its communications with the government and its flagging of “potentially violative content” to social media platforms, are all conduct that is itself “protected by the First Amendment,” said the brief.

But Stanford fears that the respondents in Murthy, including the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, “will continue pressing” before SCOTUS “their expansive theory of state action, their factual misrepresentations about Stanford’s research work, and their attempts to curtail Stanford and its researchers’ First Amendment rights," said the brief. In deciding this case, SCOTUS, like the 5th Circuit, should reject their “factual misrepresentations,” it said.

SCOTUS should also reject their efforts to interfere with the SIO’s First Amendment-protected work researching online narratives and communicating their findings to the government and social media platforms, said the brief. Private universities engage in core academic work like this “every single day,” it said.

They also have “long shared” their research findings and views with the government and other media outlets, said the brief. SCOTUS should decline to adopt any state-action theory “under which communications or collaboration with the government turn a private research institution’s work into state action,” it said. That would potentially chill “vitally important research and policy discussion on issues of great public concern,” it said.