WASHINGTON>> The Supreme Court on Friday said it would indefinitely block a lower-court order curbing Biden administration efforts to combat controversial social media posts on topics including COVID-19 and election security.

The justices said they would hear arguments in a lawsuit filed by Louisiana, Missouri and other parties accusing administration officials of unconstitutionally squelching conservative points of view. The new case adds to a term heavy with social media issues.

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas would have rejected the emergency appeal from the Biden administration.

“At this time in the history of our country, what the Court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the Government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news. That is most unfortunate,” Alito wrote in dissent.

White House communications staffers, the surgeon general, the FBI and the U.S. cybersecurity agency are among those who would have been affected. The lawsuit said they were among those who coerced changes in online content on Facebook, X and other platforms.

Notably, the companies are not part of the litigation.

A panel of three judges on the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled earlier that the administration likely brought unconstitutional pressure on the platforms. The appellate panel said officials cannot attempt to “coerce or significantly encourage” changes in online content.

The Justice Department said the appellate ruling and a broader order issued by a federal judge in Louisiana that the appeals court narrowed were riddled with mistakes.

“The 5th Circuit erred in finding coercion by the White House, surgeon general’s office and FBI because the court did not identify any threat, implicit or explicit, of adverse consequences for noncompliance,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote. “Indeed, the 5th Circuit adopted a definition of coercion so lax that it deemed the FBI’s actions coercive simply because the FBI is a powerful law enforcement agency and the platforms sometimes (but not always) removed the content it flagged.”