The U.S. Supreme Court sent the case again to lower courts for further evaluation, but unanimously declined to act on the virtues of state laws that restrict Big Tech’s control over online speech.
” The events have no briefed the vital problems around, and the report is underdeveloped”, Associate Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the jury. But we remand these situations and abandon the decisions below. That will allow the lower judges to evaluate the application of the laws and contrast the unlawful with the legal ones.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined Kagan’s judgment in total, while Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson concurred in piece and the decision. Individual thoughts of concurring in the decision were submitted by Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the latter of which was joined by Thomas and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch.
A distinct cooperating opinion was also written by Barrett.
Known as Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, the situation centered on legislation passed by Florida and Texas in 2021 that sought to oversee social media companies ‘ ability to delete articles it deemed unpleasant. This led NetChoice LLC and the Computer & Communications Industry Association,” industry organizations whose members include Facebook and YouTube,” to report “facial First Amendment issues against the rules.”
The district courts that handled the various issues issued preliminary injunctions that prohibited the statutes from enacting. Two administrative judges entered different judgments after making appeals of the decisions.
The Sunshine State’s “restrictions on material moderation set First Amendment investigation under this Court’s instances protecting “editorial choice,” according to the 11th Circuit Court, which upheld the lower court’s order against Florida’s rules. ” However, the 5th Circuit Court reversed the lower court’s order on Texas ‘ laws, ruling that” the platforms ‘ content tolerance activities are’ not talk’ at all, and so do not expose the First Amendment.”
The Supreme Court claimed that neither circuit court “discussed the physical First Amendment obstacles to Florida and Texas laws regulating big internet platforms properly” in declining to act on the merits of the laws.
According to Kagan, the key issue in this situation is whether a law’s unconstitutional applications are significant in comparison to its constitutional ones, as explained below. To make that judgment, a court must determine a law’s full set of applications, evaluate which are constitutional and which are not, and compare the one to the other. Neither court performed that necessary inquiry.”
In his concurrence, Thomas agreed with the high court’s decision to remand the matter back to the lower courts, but disagreed with its choice to” opine on certain applications of those statutes. In the exact same analysis that it reproaches the Courts of Appeals for doing,” He also criticized the court for partaking.”
” Out of the sea of ‘ variegated and complex’ functions that platforms perform … the Court plucks out two ( Facebook’s News Feed and YouTube’s homepage ), and declares that they may be protected by the First Amendment,” Thomas wrote”. The Court does so by avoiding a number of pressing factual and legal questions, which it itself describes as “incomplete” and “underdeveloped” and by ignoring several pressing issues. As Justice Alito explains, the Court’s approach is both unwarranted and mistaken.
The Supreme Court granted Big Tech’s collusion with the federal government to censor speech that the latter finds unfavorable, days after the Supreme Court allowed the latter to do so. The majority of the court’s 6-3 decision found that plaintiffs lacked standing to file the lawsuit, tossing two lower court injunctions that prevented federal agencies from cooperating with social media companies and effectively kept the government’s censorship-industrial complex intact during the 2024 election.
In his vehement dissent, Alito pointed out that the Supreme Court’s failure to stop the Biden administration’s and Big Tech’s “dangerous” censorship activities could have alarming effects for First Amendment rights of Americans.
” It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so,” Alito wrote”. Officials who read today’s decision together with , Vullo , will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message that the Court ought to convey.
Shawn Fleetwood is a University of Mary Washington graduate and a staff writer for The Federalist. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClear Health, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
