The Supreme Court gives social platforms First Amendment protections

The Future. The Supreme Court’s reversal of two separate court decisions from Florida and Texas — Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton — gives social media companies extensive leeway to choose what they push on their platforms algorithmically. But by treating social platforms more like “traditional publishers and editors,” Big Tech may find that their liability protections under the Communications Decency Act could now be weakened. Talk about a double-edged sword.

Choose your speech
The Supreme Court has determined that social media companies are protected under the First Amendment.

• Every justice agreed that social media companies have a free speech right to organize, curate, and moderate the content on their platforms as it relates to their unique Standards and Guidelines.
• Compiling and curating users’ speech into “an expressive product of its own” (like Facebook’s or YouTube’s Homepage) is also protected — even if it habitually excludes a specific subset of content.
• Also, the government can’t try to balance the “marketplace of ideas” by going against these free speech rights to show more viewpoints.

However, there are some interesting wrinkles to the decisions. A few justices mentioned that the increasing use of autonomous AI tools in moderation could raise some free speech questions because these systems don’t have the same rights as humans.

Additionally, these rights only apply to American corporations, so they don’t apply to “foreign persons and corporations located abroad.” That line could be a death blow to TikTok’s defense team.