US Supreme Court blocks Texas law forbidding social media companies from deleting posts
The US Supreme Court has suspended a Texas law(opens in new tab) that would severely restrict the ability of social media platforms to moderate content posted to their sites. The law, which went into effect in May, says platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users «may not censor a user, a user's expressions, or a user's ability to receive the expression of another person,» based on a person's point of view or geographic location."
The Texas law, HB20(opens in new tab), was actually passed in September 2021, but was blocked a few months later by a federal court on the grounds that it's likely to violate the First Amendment. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed that injunction in May, however, allowing the law to go into immediate effect. As reported by the Washington Post(opens in new tab), however, the Supreme Court voted to put the law on hold following an emergency request from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other tech industry heavyweights.
This is not the end of the battle. As the Post explained, Texas and Florida both have laws aimed at counterbalancing the tech industry's purported bias against «conservative» points of view, and if the regional appeals courts for each come to different determinations of legality—simplistically, if Texas says the law is constitutional and Florida says it is not—then the whole thing could end up in front of the Supreme Court for a final decision. It's a process that could take a long time to fully wind out.
It could also have a major impact on how social media companies manage their platforms. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton described social media platforms as «twenty-first century descendants of telegraph and telephone companies,» and said they should be treated
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