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Supreme Court remands social media moderation cases over First Amendment issues

Two state laws that could upend the way social media companies handle content moderation are still in limbo after a Supreme Court ruling sent them back to lower courts, vacating previous rulings.

The cases stem from two state laws, from Texas and Florida, which tried to impose restrictions on social media companies’ ability to moderate content. In a decision authored by Justice Elena Kagan, the court said that lower court rulings in both cases “concentrated” on the issue of “whether a state law can regulate the content-moderation practices used in Facebook’s News Feed (or near equivalents).” But, she writes, “they did not address the full range of activities the laws cover, and measure the constitutional against the unconstitutional applications.” Essentially, the usually-divided court agreed that the First Amendment implications of the laws could have broad impacts on parts of these sites unaffected by algorithmic sorting or content moderation (like direct messages, for instance) as well as on speech in general.

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