Florida law is still blocked, and the state is very interested in the outcome of the Texas battle. Florida on Wednesday filed a petition with the Supreme Court in support of Texas, and the document in Florida was signed by 11 other states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and South Carolina.
“The Amici states are very interested in protecting the regulatory powers of sovereign states in this area,” the Florida briefing said. “Indeed, many states have passed or are reviewing laws that resemble the laws of Texas and Florida, and believe the Fifth County was right to postpone the district court’s ban until appeals.”
The Texas Act applies to social networking platforms with “more than 50 million active users in the United States in a calendar month.” It states that the “social networking platform cannot censor users” based on the user’s “point of view” and defines “censorship” as “blocking, banning, deleting, deplatforming, demonetizing, deploying, restricting, denying equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against the expression of opinion ”. Under the law, users or the Texas Attorney General can sue on platforms that violate the ban.
Texas claims the First Amendment is not in effect
Texas argues that its law, which prohibits moderation on the basis of “perspective,” does not violate the First Amendment because it regulates behavior rather than speech, particularly discriminatory refusal of platforms to provide or discriminatory reductions in customer service. does not prevent restrictions on “behavior,” even if those restrictions are “imposed[e] accidental load on speech ”. Because the Hosting Rule simply requires platforms to serve customers on a non-discriminatory basis, this is a “perfectly legal thing for the government” – even if the service provided by the platforms is “another person’s speech”.
Texas argued that social media could not count on the right to “editorial opinion” because “platforms have spent years abdicating responsibility for content created by their users, or editorial control over it”. Texas also argued that a legal entity does not exercise “editorial opinion” by controlling communications between third parties. regulations that restrict how they control users’ communication with each other. ”Social platforms“ were created with the specific purpose of hosting third-party speeches and are open to the public to come and go whenever they want, ”Texas writes.
Texas said his case is upheld by the Supreme Court PruneYard a mall-related decision that prohibited visitors from engaging in art activities not directly related to [the mall’s] for commercial purposes, ”which violated California law that prohibits malls from violating visitors’ rights to “speech and petition”. Texas continued:
This court rejected the shopping center’s argument that it enjoyed “the right of the first amendment not to be forced by the state to use [its] property as a forum for others to speak. ”This court concluded that the requirement to locate in California did not violate the mall’s right to speak for three reasons. First, because the mall was“ open to the public to come and go. , if you will, “no reasonable observer would associate the views of any speaker with the views of the mall itself. Second, California does not require the mall to post” specific messages “; instead, state law applies equally to all potential speakers and messages. Third, the mall is still free to “explicitly waive any contact with” a disapproving speaker or message …
