US Supreme Court: Yes, even Facebook gets freedom of speech and press
US, from Bunny of Doom
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SocialMediaSome good news (in my opinion) regarding government control of online moderation in the US:
Supreme Court keeps red state social media crackdown on ice, ordering new lower court review...In a unanimous decision, the high court found that the two appellate courts improperly reviewed the “facial” First Amendment challenges the social media companies had made against the laws in their totality...
[Texas and Florida] enacted the laws to limit social media companies’ content-moderations policies, which aim to restrict certain views deemed as hateful, dangerous or misinformation. The laws also required the companies to provide an individualized explanation to a user for the removal or alteration of their posts. ...
“In constructing certain feeds, those platforms make choices about what third-party speech to display and how to display it,” Kagan wrote. “They include and exclude, organize and prioritize — and in making millions of those decisions each day, product their own distinctive compilations of expression. And while much about social media is new, the essence of that project is something this court has seen before.”
Those millions of decisions are functionally editorial decisions, Kagan said, and just as the First Amendment requires strict scrutiny for laws curtailing such decisions by newspapers, it should also require scrutiny for laws targeting social media’s content moderation policies. ...
The high court vacated and remanded the cases back to federal court for further proceedings to take full account of the potential impacts of the two laws.
“In sum, there is much work to do below on both these cases, given the facial nature of NetChoice’s challenges,” Kagan wrote. “But that work must be done consistently with the First Amendment, which does not go on leave when social media are involved.”