Topline
The Supreme Court will hear two cases in its upcoming term on laws in Florida and Texas that bar social media companies from “censoring” users for their beliefs, it announced Friday, as conservatives have railed against social media companies for allegedly showing bias against them while social media giants argue the laws infringe on their First Amendment rights.
The Supreme Court of the United States building on September 28.
Key Facts
The court will take up two cases, Moody v. Netchoice LLC and Netchoice LLC v. Paxton, and consider whether the social media censorship laws’ rules on content moderation—and a requirement that platforms provide individual explanations to users whose content they remove—violate the First Amendment.
Florida’s law fines social media companies up to $250,000 per day if they “willfully deplatform” political candidates by banning them or suspending them for more than two weeks, and also prohibits banning “journalistic enterprises” for its content.
Texas’ law similarly bars social media platforms from censoring users based on their “viewpoints,” and requires companies to disclose how they moderate content, explain to users why their content was removed and establish a complaint process for users to protest either content on the site or content moderation decisions.
Florida’s law has been blocked by lower courts, except for a provision that allows blocked users to access their data for 60 days.
Texas’ law was allowed to take effect by a lower appeals court in September 2022, after the Supreme Court kept a previous court ruling blocking the law in effect while the case moved forward.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in May 2022 to temporarily block the law, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch being in favor of letting the law take effect.
What To Watch For
The Supreme Court will hear the social media cases in its upcoming term that begins Monday, though it hasn’t set a date yet for when oral arguments will take place. The court will issue its opinions in the cases at some point before its term ends in June 2024.
Chief Critic
NetChoice, which is opposing Florida and Texas in court on behalf of the social media companies, argues the laws unlawfully violate the platforms’ First Amendment rights. The Texas law “infringes the core First Amendment rights of Petitioners’ members by denying them editorial control over their own websites, while forcing them to publish speech they do not wish to disseminate,” NetChoice wrote in a court filing, similarly arguing Florida’s law “violates the First Amendment several times over” by “compel[ing]
privately owned and operated websites to disseminate speech that they do not wish to publish.”Key Background
Florida and Texas’ laws—passed in May and September 2021, respectively—are a response to a longtime complaint by conservatives that social media companies purportedly discriminate against them for their views. Republicans have railed against social media platforms as high-profile users on the right have been banned for violating policies like hate speech or misinformation, which escalated after former President Donald Trump was banned from Facebook, Twitter (now known as X) and other networks in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol Building. Trump, who formed his own network Truth Social in response to his bannings, filed his own lawsuits against social media companies in July 2021, arguing the companies infringed on his and other Republicans’ First Amendment rights by censoring them. (The Twitter lawsuit was dismissed in federal district court and Trump has appealed the ruling; cases against Facebook and YouTube remain pending.) Despite the widespread allegations from conservatives regarding the alleged “bias” against them on social media networks, researchers at New York University have found there is no evidence to support claims that Facebook and Twitter were biased against the right.
Surprising Fact
Many high-profile right-wing users who had previously been banned from Twitter had their accounts reinstated after billionaire Elon Musk took control of the platform, including Trump, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulous and right-wing attorneys Lin Wood and Sidney Powell. While the reinstatements were part of a broader effort by Musk to take a more “free-speech” based approach to Twitter—and also included users on the other side of the political aisle, like comedian Kathy Griffin—Musk has pushed the conspiracy that Twitter has been biased against conservatives. “Rules were enforced against the right, but not against the left,” Musk claimed in a December 2022 tweet.
Further Reading
Appeals Court Keeps Florida’s Social Media Censorship Law On Hold Due To 1st Amendment Concerns (Forbes)
Supreme Court Blocks Texas From Enforcing Social Media ‘Censorship’ Law (Forbes)
False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim that Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives (New York University)
The Supreme Court showdown over social media “censorship,” explained (Vox)