A Supreme Court speech showdown is coming, and nobody knows what to expect

There is a question that the US Supreme Court is about to decide. Over the past year, laws in Texas and Florida have set up a legal battle over whether the First Amendment protects social networks from being forced to host almost any speech their users post. The courts split reflects a deeper shift in how to interpret a basic constitutional right, which is reflected in a political culture war and backlash against large web platforms

For a long time, moderation decisions have been assumed to be protected by the First Amendment. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals made a surprise ruling last month over a Texas law that banned large apps and websites from moderating content. The law went into effect despite the court's ruling against NetChoice and theCCIA. A preview of a Supreme Court battle was offered by the temporary blocking of the law.

One of the groups that supported the petition is the libertarian-leaning TechFreedom. The Fifth Circuit is sympathetic to Texas and hasn't decided on the law's merits. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Florida's similar law in May. It is almost certain that this will cause a circuit split and go up next term.

Is the government able to regulate how social networks sort and remove legal content? Proponents of community standards argue that private companies have a right to not speak in certain circumstances. The sites have First Amendment rights that are limited.

Both sides are leaning on old cases involving non-digital spaces and tech, and the Texas law in particular repurposes legal terms out of context. Federal rules don't apply to internet service providers, so social networks are labeled as utility-like common carriers. The Supreme Court has used the term "viewpoint discrimination" to describe government restrictions on speech, but Texas lawmakers have treated private companies as synonymous with conservative content.

The implications of a Supreme Court ruling in favor of Texas would go far beyond the ban on Donald Trump on Facebook. Democrats have talked about punishing the spread of health misinformation. The ruling won't apply to the biggest social media companies Texas has a law that applies to services with 50 million active users.

Texas and Florida politicians describe their bills as conservative weapons against liberal tech companies. Even for good-faith debate over the First Amendment, Free Press is a risky place for any Supreme Court decision. This isn't a good time to talk about free speech because it isn't the way to regulate it. There are ways that can be accomplished. It is not one of those avenues for a state to protect certain speech.

There are real concerns about large social networks, which have tremendous power to shape speech online, in some cases changing the way a generation talks. She argued that a ruling that their community standards aren't protected speech would have catastrophic consequences. She says that people who are in favor of the law think it will protect speech. Governments dictate what private actors can and can't do and pick and choose speech that is acceptable in every country around the world.

There is a lack of explanation for the movement of the law. The case flowed through the Supreme Court's "shadow docket" emergency petition system after the Fifth Circuit declined to offer a rationale for its decision.

The case has been unusual. There has been a lack of information from the majority at all levels.

Court watchers are wondering what the vote means. Alex Abdo is a litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The dissent written by Alito was co-signed by Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch and emphasized that he hadn't reached a conclusion on the law. Several experts said that Justice Elena Kagan's vote against the decision may have been a protest against the shadow docket, but that was still open to interpretation.

Philip Hamburger, a professor at the Columbia Law School, believes that the early vote doesn't say a lot about the law's prospects. The Supreme Court may have thrown out the stay because the case is so important. The constitutional question wasn't resolved by it.

The CCIA president believes there is little ambiguity. Five members of the federal judiciary have made clear their views on the fairness doctrine for the internet, and they all agree that it is not constitutional. He disagreed with the idea that courts weren't clear on the law. He referred to the district court opinions in Texas and Florida as well as the appeals court decision in Florida, all of which have largely rejected the states' reasoning.

Critics of the law are not as positive. I don't agree with every First Amendment argument the platforms make, but the central argument they make is that they have a right to enforce community norms of their choosing. The justices in the dissent seem prepared to reject that argument. Justice Thomas is a well-known advocate of novel legal theories about internet law and he is likely to favor arguments for regulating social media.

More nuanced questions about what the First Amendment might protect could be addressed by the court. According to Will Oremus of The Washington Post, parts of Florida's law were allowed to stand by the Eleventh Circuit. The platform argument that the First Amendment insulates them from all regulation was rejected by the Knight Institute.

The recent court decisions are part of a political and cultural landscape where the First Amendment is at stake. According to a recent University of Chicago Law Review Online analysis, first amendment politics are more complicated, uncertain, and just plain weird than they have been in a long time.

The Supreme Court fight over speech is similar to the battles over digital privacy and surveillance of the past decades. The Supreme Court has been asked to answer the question of how the Fourth Amendment applies in the digital age. In the digital age, what are our privacy rights? The question of state power in the 2000s may be decided by Supreme Court precedents from the 1960s and 70’s. No technology has changed according to the Supreme Court. The government is no longer able to surveil. People think of privacy in a different way. The questions have to be answered.

There is a chance that could happen here. He thinks that courts will have to reexamine how the First Amendment applies to new technologies. I hope that their interpretation of the First Amendment serves the values that free speech is supposed to serve.