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The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

Can states decide how social networks moderate?

Though there are some differences between the two laws, both essentially limit the ability of large online platforms to curate or ban content on their sites, seeking to fight what lawmakers claim are rules that suppress conservative speech. Gautam Hans, associate director of the First Amendment Clinic at Cornell Law School, says the states could also argue that the sheer volume of speech that platforms have to deal with precludes the “coherent editorial perspective” a newspaper might have. “Rather than be forced to disseminate obviously false information or to provide a thorough rationale each time a Wikipedia article is edited, the Foundation and its users may decide that the safer course is to avoid certain topics altogether — thus resulting in an ‘encyclopedia’ that omits mention of critical social and political issues of the day,” the group wrote.

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