The US Supreme Court on Tuesday suspended a Texas law that restricts social media editorial space without solving the thorny issue that advocates of stricter content moderation oppose policies that invoke “censorship.”
Last September, the Texas governor passed a law banning social networks from banning users “because of their political opinions” in the name of “freedom of speech.”
Conservative lawmakers in the US regularly accuse Facebook, YouTube (Google) and Twitter, among others, of “censorship” against them and pro-Democrat bias, although many governors and officials from both parties use major platforms to their advantage.
The new law was challenged by a court and then came into effect after going through an appeals court. However, organizations representing the tech giants filed a petition with the Supreme Court, which was granted provisional on Tuesday pending the appeals court’s decision on the main issue.
The companies “allege” that the new Texas law “interferes with the exercise of their + editorial judgment + asserting that this interference violates their right not to +distribute + speech produced by others,” Conservative Judge Samuel Alito notes in his statement.
“In certain circumstances, we have recognized the right of organizations to refuse to host the expression of others. But we turned it down in different circumstances,” he muses. “It’s not at all clear that these pre-Internet precedents should apply to large social networks.”
The two clashing clans all claim freedom of speech as defined by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits the government from censoring — but not corporations.
Tensions between California groups and Republicans have escalated since Donald Trump’s ban from major platforms in early 2021, when he used the networks to encourage the rioters who marched into Congress in Washington on Jan. 6, killing five people.
Facebook and its competitors are fighting back against censorship and proposing rules designed to encourage peaceful exchanges, while many NGOs and Democrats are urging them to crack down on hate speech even more.
“Texas law threatens to undo years of work by activists around the world to get social media to take hate, harassment and misinformation seriously,” the NGO Center for Democracy and Technology said.
An appeals court recently ruled that a similar law passed in Florida violated the First Amendment.