In mid-2021, about a year before he began his longstanding feud with the biggest employer in his state, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation attempting to seize control of content moderation at major social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter (now called X by Elon Musk). A few months later, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, signed similar legislation in his state.
Both laws are almost comically unconstitutional — the First Amendment does not permit the government to order media companies to publish content they do not wish to publish — and neither law is currently in effect. A federal appeals court halted the key provisions of Florida’s law in 2022, and the Supreme Court temporarily blocked Texas’s law shortly thereafter (though the justices, somewhat ominously, split 5-4 in this later case).
Nevertheless, the justices have not yet weighed in on whether these two unconstitutional laws must be permanently blocked, and that question is now before the Court in a pair of cases known as Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton.
The stakes in both cases are quite high, and the Supreme Court’s decision is likely to reveal where each one of the Republican justices falls on the GOP’s internal conflict between old-school free market capitalists and a newer generation that is eager to pick cultural fights with business.
Proponents of the two laws have not hidden that they were enacted entirely because Republican lawmakers in Texas and Florida believed that social media websites must do more to elevate conservative voices. As DeSantis said of his state’s law, it exists to fight supposedly “biased silencing” of “our freedom of speech as conservatives … by the ‘big tech’ oligarchs in Silicon Valley.”
So, if the Supreme Court were to uphold these laws, it would give Republican policymakers sweeping and unprecedented ability to control what many American voters read about our elections and our…
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