US Appeals Court Rules Social Media Content Moderation Should Be Restricted
A federal court’s ruling leaves big social media platforms with a trying choice: Subject themselves to a plague of lawsuits from their most toxic users, or stop most of their content moderation and surrender their spaces to those same toxic users.
On Wednesday, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned a stay of a social media law Texas passed last year that essentially outlaws viewpoint-based content moderation. The single-page ruling(Opens in a new window) from judges Jerry E. Smith, Stephen A. Higginson, and Don R. Willett allows the law to enter force while a challenge to that law from two tech industry groups continues.
House Bill 20(Opens in a new window), signed Sept. 9(Opens in a new window) by Gov. Greg Abbott, says online forums with more than 50 million monthly average users “may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person based on: (1) the viewpoint of the user or another person; (2) the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression; or (3) a user’s geographic location in this state or any part of this state.”
The law defines “censor” as anything that impedes a post: “block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.”
The content that H.B. 20 says sites may still block is limited to material that federal law lets them censor, that organizations fighting sexual exploitation of children have flagged, that “directly incites criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence” targeting “race, color, disability, religion, national origin or ancestry, age, sex, or status as a peace officer or judge,” or is
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