The justices are expected to weigh the free speech rights of social media platforms against their users’ rights in Florida and Texas cases.
A looming battle at the Supreme Court may determine how social media companies moderate content. The nation’s highest court will hear challenges to laws in Florida and Texas that regulate social media content moderation.
Observers and activists on the left and right are watching the cases.
At stake is the right of individual Americans to freely express themselves online and the right of social media platforms to make editorial decisions about the content they host. Both rights are protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Republicans and conservatives were outraged when platforms acted in concert to ban President Donald Trump in January 2021, blocked a potentially election-altering New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop on 2020, and silenced dissenting opinions about the origins of the COVID-19 virus, the treatments for the disease it causes, and the vaccines.
Steven Allen, a distinguished senior fellow at Capital Research Center, a watchdog group, said conservatives have long complained about their treatment on social media platforms.
“Imagine if you had a system analogous to what Facebook does, where if you say something on the telephone to someone that Facebook doesn’t like, or the phone company doesn’t like, and then they interrupt your call to say, ‘you know, experts disagree with that,’ … and then they wouldn’t let you continue to say what you wanted to say,” Mr. Allen said.
“People would be, of course, outraged.”
Facebook shouldn’t be allowed “to pick the ones it doesn’t like,” he told The Epoch Times.
Democrats and liberals, on the other hand, claim the platforms don’t do enough to weed out so-called hate speech and alleged misinformation, which they consider to be pressing social problems.
Moderators at the social media site Reddit filed a brief saying if the laws were upheld, the site would no longer be able to take down content threatening, for example, Supreme Court justices.
They provided a screen grab of a news article headline reading “Supreme Court’s John Roberts says judicial system ‘cannot and should not live in fear.’”
