FREE SPEECH AND DEBATE — Texas and Florida laws attempting to restrict social media companies from removing certain posts and accounts came under scrutiny during arguments at the Supreme Court today. After multiple tech companies removed former President Donald Trump from their platforms in the wake of Jan. 6, 2021, Florida made it illegal for social media platforms to bar candidates running for public office in the state from their platforms. Texas later passed a law prohibiting social media companies from taking down content related to politics. The ruling — and how narrow or broad it turns out to be — could have a huge impact on how social media companies, which are largely left to their own devices by the government to do content moderation, are allowed to operate. The two laws haven’t taken effect because of suits from two tech industry groups — NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association. And now, with the issue reaching the Supreme Court, each side is claiming the mantle of free speech: The tech industry groups, supported by the Biden administration, say it’s a social media company’s right under the First Amendment to select and present speech as they choose. Meanwhile, lawyers for Texas and Florida argued that these tech companies are in violation of the First Amendment because they are restricting speech. To get a sense of the stakes and the state of play after a busy day at the high court, Nightly called up Rebecca Kern , a tech policy reporter for POLITICO who spent the day listening to oral arguments at the Supreme Court and has covered this story for months. This interview has been edited. What are the two cases in front of the Supreme Court today, and why are they important? They’re important because they could determine the future of how social media companies police online speech on their platforms. It all goes back to Jan. 6, 2021, and the major social media platforms banning then-President Donald Trump from their sites for violating their rules against incitement of violence. After that, Texas and Florida passed laws that would prevent social media platforms from banning politicians and from basically removing users’ viewpoints. Two tech trade groups sued to stop these laws from going into effect, saying these laws violate our First Amendment rights, because you can’t force companies to carry speech that breaks their own policies. They’ve gone all the way up to the Supreme Court and they’d have a pretty big impact on how social media companies can act if they go into effect. As you suggested in a story this afternoon , some of the justices were at least fairly skeptical of this state’s arguments. What did the oral arguments tell us? I think the justices were largely pretty skeptical. They suggested that it is a violation of the First Amendment when a state compels speech. But in addition, some of the justices were suggesting that some of the provisions of these laws may be constitutional, so they were grappling with whether to block the laws in full or write an exemption that would send part of the question back to a lower court. In particular, some conservative justices suggested that it would make sense to uphold parts of the Florida law. So it’s unclear how they’ll write their decision, but I think they outright did say that big social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or X have the right to moderate content on their platforms. Were there any moments that stood out to you from the oral arguments today? We did hear from Justice Samuel Alito, who was asking lawyers for the tech companies to define content moderation and equating content moderation with censorship. So, some justices do still feel that conservatives continue to be censored on these platforms, and I don’t know if you’ll see them join the majority decision. Paul Clement, who is defending the tech lobbyists, also said that if you force us to carry all speech, that means we’re going to have to carry “both sides” — if there are posts that are advocating for suicide prevention, these platforms would have to carry posts that are pro-suicide as well, for example. He was drawing attention to the idea that the states didn’t necessarily understand the breadth of what they were doing when they were writing these laws. On Sunday, you wrote for POLITICO that no matter the outcome of the case, in some sense, conservatives have already won. Can you explain that? When these laws were passed in 2021, they were done so with a goal to re-platform Trump and punish the platforms for removing him. But in the last three years, the whole social media system has changed. It began with X when Elon Musk took over in Oct. 2022 and reinstated Trump pretty soon after, which put pressure on other platforms to follow suit, especially when Trump announced his candidacy. So, if conservatives’ goals when passing these laws were to reinstate Trump and get more conservatives back on the platforms, they’ve already succeeded. I even talked with one of the state lawmakers involved in crafting the Florida legislation who said that we’re seeing less deplatforming of conservative voices than in 2021. We’ve also seen more conservative-friendly social media sites pop up. Some conservatives continue to argue, though, that censorship is still happening. At the same time, a lot of these big platforms want to get further away from politics. In the last month, Meta announced that Threads and Instagram won’t be promoting political content. That doesn’t mean they’re going to ban politicians, but I think they just don’t want to be in the business of unnecessarily moderating political views if they don’t have to be. So what does the future of content moderation look like, based on the legal questions at the Supreme Court and other political ones? It’s still a little unclear how a ruling will look, but I do think we have some sense from today’s oral arguments that there will be a more narrow ruling saying these laws do violate the First Amendment, but that these platforms don’t have full reign on not being regulated at all. Even the Solicitor General on behalf of the Biden administration [who submitted a brief supporting the tech companies’ case] argued today that there’s still ways to rein in these companies that aren’t in violation of the First Amendment. This larger debate also isn’t over. There’s another Supreme Court case coming up on March 18 concerning whether or not the Biden administration coerces platforms to take down content. So we’ll be covering that as well. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh .
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.