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Supreme Court protects the future of content moderation


It has major implications for the future of online speech.

As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the opinion for the Court’s majority, the First Amendment, “does not go on leave when social media are involved.” In the majority opinion, Kagan wrote that they chose to vacate the conflicting appeals court decisions “for reasons separate from the First Amendment merits.” Instead, the justices felt that the appeals courts only focused on the ways the laws could apply to the kinds of products the parties in the cases were most worried about — as if the laws applied only to the curated feeds offered by the largest and most paradigmatic social-media platforms—as if, say, each case presented an as-applied challenge brought by Facebook protesting its loss of control over the content of its News Feed,” Kagan wrote in the majority opinion. The cases were about a pair of similar laws in Florida and Texas that aimed to limit how large social media companies could moderate content on their sites.

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