The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday issued a ruling blocking a Texas law aimed at preventing big social media services from “censoring” users or content based on viewpoint.
The court ruled 5-4 to block the law, which is pending a challenge before a federal appeals about whether it is constitutional. The court did not provide a reason for why it upheld a lower court’s injunction preventing the law from taking effect pending appeal.
The Supreme Court was ruling on an emergency application filed by two tech industry groups, representing companies including Meta, Google and Twitter, which had claimed that the Texas law “would compel platforms to disseminate all sorts of objectionable viewpoints,” including “neo-Nazi or KKK screeds denying or supporting the Holocaust.”
The Texas law would make it illegal for large social networks to “block, ban, remove, de-platform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.”
Known as HB 20, the Texas law applies to social-media platforms with more than 50 million active monthly users, a group that includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat. The legislation was passed in September 2021, but a lower court granted a preliminary injunction preventing it from taking effect.
A judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas in December issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law, citing the First Amendment. “Social media companies have a First Amendment right to moderate content disseminated on their platforms,” Judge Robert Pitman wrote in the decision.
In a dissenting opinion on Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. wrote, that the preliminary injunction “was itself a significant intrusion on state sovereignty” and that Texas “should not be required to seek preclearance from the federal courts before its laws go into effect.”
More to come