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Platforms Have First Amendment Right to Curate Speech

Social media platforms, at least in their most common form, have a First Amendment right to curate the third-party speech they select for and recommend to their users, and the government’s ability to manipulate those processes is extremely limited, the U.S. Supreme Court stated in its landmark...

As Justice Kagan, writing for the court’s majority, wrote, “the First Amendment offers protection when an entity engaging in expressive activity, including compiling and curating others’ speech, is directed to accommodate messages it would prefer to exclude.” The Supreme Court specified that it was not assessing whether the same right would apply to personalized curation decisions made algorithmically solely based on user behavior online without any reference to a site’s own standards or guidelines. But the Supreme Court has helpfully resolved a central question and provided a First Amendment framework for analyzing the legality of government efforts to dictate what content social media platforms should or should not publish.

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