The Twitter Wars have arrived at the Supreme Court.
On Halloween, the Supreme Court will hear the first two in a series of five cases the justices plan to decide in their current term that ask what the government’s relationship should be with social media outlets like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter (the social media app that Elon Musk insists on calling “X”).
These first two cases are, admittedly, the most low-stakes of the lot — at least from the perspective of ordinary citizens who care about free speech. Together, the first two cases, O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier and Lindke v. Freed, involve three social media users who did nothing more than block someone on their Twitter or Facebook accounts. But these three social media users are also government officials. And when a government official blocks someone, that raises very thorny First Amendment questions that are surprisingly difficult to sort out.
Two of the three other cases, meanwhile, ask whether the government may order social media sites to publish content they do not wish to publish — something that, under longstanding law, is an unambiguous violation of the First Amendment. The last case concerns whether the government may merely ask these outlets to pull down content.
When the Supreme Court closes out its term this summer, in other words, it could become the central player in the conflicts that drive the Way Too Online community: Which content, if any, should be removed from social media websites? Which users are too toxic for Twitter or Facebook? How much freedom should social media users, and especially government officials, have to censor or block people who annoy them online? And should decisions about who can post online be made by the free market, or by government officials who may have a political stake in the outcome?
Some of the disputes that arise out of these questions are quite weighty. But if the Supreme Court allows itself to get pulled into the Twitter Wars, it risks…
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