Supreme Court sends GOP-backed social media cases back to lower courts in moderation fight

WASHINGTON − The Supreme Court on Monday said Republican-backed laws in Texas and Florida limiting the ability of powerful social media companies to moderate content must be reevaluated by the lower courts.

The justices said the lower courts didn't properly evaluate the full scope of the laws when weighing whether they violated the First Amendment.

The laws were prompted in part by the decision of Twitter, Facebook and other social media companies to boot former President Donald Trump from their platforms after the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump partisans.

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, said the court rejected the broadest arguments made by both the Republican-controlled states and the social media giants.

“The social media companies asked for a sweeping ruling that would have placed their business models beyond the reach of regulation. The states asked for a ruling that would have given them immense power to manipulate and control public discourse online,” Jaffer said.

“The Court was entirely right to reject these requests, both of which would have done real harm to our democracy."

The ruling provided some guidance for lower courts as they reconsider the Florida and Texas laws, experts said, which could prevent states from limiting content moderation on curated news streams while possibly allowing rules that discourage moderation on more automated feeds.

“In other words, the court held that the free speech rights of social media companies are only implicated where they are engaging in expression by picking and choosing what postings to show," said Kirk McGill, a constitutional law expert.

The laws were passed in 2021 in response to concerns that conservative viewpoints were being suppressed on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

But trade groups representing the social media companies sued, saying governments can’t tell the platforms what to post − just as a state can’t tell a newspaper what to publish.

Content moderation is necessary, the companies contend, to prevent the sites from becoming mere “gobbledy-gook” and to avoid extremism, harassment and hate speech.

The states argued sites like Facebook are less like a newspaper and more like a telephone line which transmits content generated by customers instead of creating it themselves.

And because of the huge impact social media giants have over public debate, information needs to flow freely online, they said.

Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for president, filed a brief in support of the laws because of his “direct interest in upholding these statutes.”

The Biden administration sided with the social media companies, saying that while there are ways to regulate the sites that don’t violate the First Amendment, the Texas and Florida laws aren’t among them.

Inspired in part by decision of Twitter and other major platforms to suspend Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the laws would have severely limited the ability of social media companies to kick users off their platforms or remove individual posts for violating a platform's rules. Platforms would also have had to provide individualized explanations to a user for removing or altering a post.

Florida’s law had been blocked by a Georgia-based 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

The Louisiana-based 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals found no constitutional issues with Texas’ law but kept it on hold while that decision was being appealed.

During nearly four hours of oral arguments in February, the justices complained that they didn’t have enough information to evaluate the impact of the laws, including which platforms would be affected and what actions on those sites might be covered.

The cases are Moody v. Netchoice and Netchoice v. Paxton.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court: Texas, Florida social media laws need further review