Supreme Court Punts on Florida and Texas Social Media Laws, Sends Cases Back to Lower Courts

The Supreme Court on July 1 sent legal challenges to laws in Florida and Texas that regulate how social media platforms moderate content back to lower courts, finding that they failed to analyze the two cases properly.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote the court’s unanimous decision. Despite the 9-0 vote on the judgment, not all justices agreed with its reasoning.

This was the first time the nation’s highest court had reviewed state laws that deem social media companies “common carriers,” a status that might allow states to impose utility-style regulations on platforms and forbid them from discriminating against users based on their political viewpoints.

Observers and activists on the left and right watched the cases closely.

At stake was the right of individual Americans to freely express themselves online and the right of social media platforms to make editorial decisions about the content they host. These competing rights are both protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Republicans and conservatives were outraged when platforms acted in concert to ban President Donald Trump in January 2021, blocked a potentially election-altering New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020, and silenced dissenting opinions about the origins of the COVID-19 virus, the treatments for the disease it causes, and the vaccines. They say that social media platforms have become the new town square and that users’ speech enjoys constitutional protection.

Democrats and liberals, on the other hand, claim that the platforms don’t do enough to weed out so-called hate speech and alleged misinformation, which they consider to be pressing social problems.

The challenge to the Florida statute is Moody v. net Choice LLC; the challenge to the Texas law is Net Choice LLC v. Paxton. On Feb. 26, the justices heard nearly four hours of oral arguments.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit halted part of the law, and Florida appealed to the Supreme Court. The circuit court struck down part of the Florida statute, finding that “with minor exceptions, the government can’t tell a private person or entity what to say or how to say it.”

Even the “biggest” platforms are “private actors whose rights the First Amendment protects … [and] their so-called content-moderation decisions constitute protected exercises of editorial judgment.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit took the opposite tack, finding a Texas anti-de-platforming law constitutional and rejecting the “idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say.”

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Patrick Robinson

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