News February 28,2024 | Independence Journal Editorial Team

Supreme Court To Weigh In On Social Media Restrictions In Florida, Texas

The Supreme Court has begun hearing cases involving laws imposed in Texas and Florida limiting social media platforms’ abilities to censor Americans.

These two Republican-led states have passed laws that prevent social media companies from banning users based on their political beliefs, even if the speech goes against the platform’s standards. Texas’ law bars social media companies from banning users based on their views and requires the companies to make their content policies public. Florida, on the other hand, passed a law prohibiting social media companies from banning public figures and prohibits shadow-banning — a sneaky method by which social media companies secretly decrease the reach of certain users.

 

The laws came in the aftermath of multiple social media platforms coordinating to ban former president and current GOP primary frontrunner Donald Trump while he was still in office. The bans were supposedly in response to out-of-context portrayals of Trump’s comments on Jan. 6, 2021, though it was clear that these platforms were looking for an excuse to ban Trump for some time before the incident.

During the Monday hearing, a key divide was evident among the Supreme Court justices over a prominent argument from critics of social media platforms’ censorship policies — the question of whether these sites should be considered platforms or publishers. Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justice Brett Kavanaugh and all of the left-wing justices, appeared to be on the side of continuing to consider them as platforms, claiming that government regulation of social media sites would violate the First Amendment. The more conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, appeared to be concerned with the platforms seeking constitutional protection for “censoring other speech.”

This argument, based on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, puts forth the claim that a platform should either be a neutral public forum and enjoy broad First Amendment protection against being held liable for the speech of its users, or it should be a publisher and be held liable for that speech because it exercises editorial control over users’ speech.

Many have warned that these two cases before the Supreme Court could have serious consequences, changing the nature of free expression online.

“These cases are potentially of enormous, enormous scope,” said Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “This will be the first time that the Supreme Court really weighs in on the First Amendment rights of social media platforms, and therefore, the shape and contours of free speech online.”

Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has already spoken out about the case in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter — declaring that, regardless of the outcome, he would continue to battle Big Tech.

“We knew this day would come,” DeSantis said. “Whatever the court decides, we’re going to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to ensure that people have the right to speak in these public forums.”

The Supreme Court is expected to issue rulings on the cases before the end of June. The Florida case is Moody v. NetChoice and the Texas case is NetChoice v. Paxton.

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