What Supreme Court Hearing Signals for Big Tech

Today just may have been the most important day for the future of tech. We’re talking about the Supreme Court arguments regarding Florida and Texas state laws that curb the freedom of tech companies such as Meta Platforms and Google to moderate content on their own platforms. Judging from the coverage by the news outlets present at the hearing—see here, here and here—the court correctly perceived the complexities of the content moderation issue. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett observed, according to Bloomberg, the cases have some “landmines” to avoid. In other words, the court's final ruling may not be straightforward.

To recap, the laws in question date from 2021, when Republican governors of the two states, believing tech platforms were often suppressing conservative viewpoints, signed into law slightly different versions of the same idea. Florida’s law prohibits platforms from kicking off someone who is a candidate for political office, while the Texas law prohibits big social media platforms from censoring a user based on their viewpoint. Both laws have been on hold as a result of legal challenges by the tech industry, which sees them as existential threats to free speech.