US Appeals Court Tosses Most Provisions of Florida Social-Media Law
Most of Florida’s sweeping 2021 social-media law now lies in the federal judiciary’s equivalent of the Trash folder. On Monday, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit agreed with most of the arguments advanced by two tech-industry groups that core provisions of this 2021 statute likely violate the First Amendment.
Florida's S.B. 7072(Opens in a new window), signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in May 2021, targets what the governor called(Opens in a new window) “Big Tech censors” promoting “the dominant Silicon Valley ideology.” It requires moderately large social platforms—gross revenues above $100 million a year or monthly average users of 100 million suffice—to carry all posts by officially filed political candidates(Opens in a new window) and all posts by users about those candidates, regardless of their content and without any downranking, labeling, or editing.
(As enacted in 2021, the law exempted companies that ran “a theme park or entertainment complex” in the state, but legislators deleted that Walt Disney Co. carveout in April(Opens in a new window) after it landed on their enemies list(Opens in a new window) for opposing a state law(Opens in a new window) that banned “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” from kindergarten through the third grade.)
The law also compels the same online forums to carry posts from “journalistic enterprises” that meet such criteria as having having “at least 50,000 paid subscribers or 100,000 monthly active users,” or publishing “100 hours of audio or video available online with at least 100 million viewers annually,” although that provision allows censorship for obscenity.
The short version of the 67-page
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