The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments on whether a 2021 Florida law that limits social media companies’ ability to moderate and edit content on their platforms violates the First Amendment.
In a Sept. 29 announcement, the high court agreed to hear the case of Moody v. NetChoice LLC and NetChoice LLC v. Paxton. That latter case involves a Texas law that is similar to Florida’s Senate Bill 7072, which Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody argues will protect its residents from arbitrary censorship by technology companies such as Facebook and X, formerly Twitter.
The Florida law was passed in response to accusations that social media companies silenced certain content posted by users on their platforms, such as contested claims about the coronavirus pandemic and some reports about the business dealings by President Biden’s son, Hunter.
“We are pleased that the court granted our request for the Supreme Court to hear the case,” the spokeswoman for the Florida Attorney General’s Office, Kylie Mason, told the Florida Record in an email, “and we look forward to defending our social media law that protects Floridians.”
The high court is likely to hear oral arguments in the case early in 2024, according to the Scotusblog news website.
Specifically, the Supreme Court agreed to review two questions associated with the litigation: Does the Florida law violate the First Amendment by restricting the tech companies’ ability to edit, remove or moderate platform posts? And do provisions of the law that mandate the company to explain their reasoning for why they removed or edited content violate free-speech rights of private businesses?
The U.S. solicitor general has filed a brief calling on the court to strike down both of those provisions in the Florida law.
NetChoice, a professional group made up of tech companies, is the co-plaintiff in the Florida and Texas cases along with the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA). These cases are similar in some ways to another case that has been litigated in Louisiana, Missouri v. Biden, in which social media companies were accused of colluding with federal officials to remove controversial content from their platforms.
"The Missouri and the NetChoice & CCIA cases both concern government efforts to police online speech, but the cases differ in the formality of the speech-policing efforts involved,” Nicole Saad Bembridge, NetChoice’s associate director of litigation, told the Record in an email.
The NetChoice/CCIA cases aim to determine whether state statutes forcing social media companies to host content they don’t want to publish violates their free-speech rights, according to Bembridge.
“In Missouri, the court will consider whether more informal governmental efforts – including private emails – to convince social media companies to publish or remove particular content also cross the line into unconstitutional censorship,” she said. “Whether formal or informal, government efforts to influence what lawful speech appears on the internet are a growing problem that should be opposed.”
CCIA President Matt Schruers said the issues the Supreme Court has decided to take up go hand in hand with democratic principles.
“It is high time that the Supreme Court resolves whether governments can force websites to publish dangerous content,” Schruers said in a prepared statement. “Telling private websites they must give equal treatment to extremist hate isn’t just unwise, it is unconstitutional, and we look forward to demonstrating that to the court.”