In an order Friday afternoon, the justices agreed to hear the Biden administration’s challenge to a lower court order blocking it from urging social media companies to remove certain content that the White House claimed was misinformation around Covid-19 vaccines, Hunter Biden’s laptop and the contested 2020 election results.

In taking the case, the justices also blocked the lower court’s injunction, which had been set to kick in within minutes and would have barred many types of contact between federal officials and the social media giants. The high court’s action means that administration officials can keep contacting social media companies for now while the Supreme Court weighs the case.

Three conservative justices — Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — dissented from the decision to block the injunction, joining in a five-page opinion by Alito that called the court’s action “highly disturbing” and said it threatened to curtail the discussion of unpopular political views online.

[Read the order and dissent at this link. Needless to say, this does not bode well for the plaintiffs in Missouri v Biden, and the fact that only three justices object to the stay on the injunction leads me to be very pessimistic on the outcome of the full review by the court. It looks like the other six are focusing more on the harms to government in an order restraining them from censorship than the harms of the clear violations of the First Amendment on Americans. — Ed]