Supreme Court weighs social media laws, challenging censorship and First Amendment implications. Significant precedent at stake.

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EXACTLY: “The platforms are not newspapers. Their censorship is not speech.”

That’s from one of the opinions up for oral argument in the Supreme Court today. Quoted in “Supreme Court to Hear Free Speech Challenges to Social Media Laws/The tech industry argues that laws in Florida and Texas, prompted by conservative complaints about censorship, violate the First Amendment. The court’s decision could fundamentally alter the nature of speech on the internet” (NYT).

The Supreme Court blocked the Texas law in 2022 while the case moved forward by a 5-to-4 vote…. Justice Alito wrote… that he was skeptical of the argument that the social media companies have editorial discretion protected by the First Amendment the way newspapers and other traditional publishers do.

“It is not at all obvious,” he wrote, “how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies.”