Author Topic: Supreme Court temporarily blocks Texas social media law  (Read 373 times)

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Offline Right_in_Virginia

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Supreme Court temporarily blocks Texas social media law
« on: May 31, 2022, 11:40:54 pm »
Supreme Court temporarily blocks Texas social media law
The Hill,  May 31, 2022

A Texas law that would bar social media companies from taking action on hate speech and disinformation was temporarily blocked Tuesday in a rare 5-4 Supreme Court ruling.

Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer ruled in favor of tech industry groups looking to block the law, with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Elena Kagan dissenting.

The decision is a win for tech groups pushing back on laws coming from Republican-controlled state legislatures that seek to put barriers on social media companies’ ability to moderate content.

A case on the law itself may wind up back before the Supreme Court as it makes its way through challenges in lower courts. But Tuesday’s decision means the law — which critics have said could lead to a more dangerous internet — will remain blocked for now in Texas, reversing a decision from a court of appeals earlier this month.

In Alito’s dissenting opinion, he said he has not “formed a definitive view on the novel legal questions that arise from Texas’s decision to address the ‘changing social and economic’ conditions it perceives.”

"But precisely because of that, I am not comfortable intervening at this point in the proceedings. While I can understand the Court’s apparent desire to delay enforcement of HB20 while the appeal is pending, the preliminary injunction entered by the District Court was itself a significant intrusion on state sovereignty, and Texas should not be required to seek preclearance from the federal courts before its laws go into effect,” he added.

The law forbids social media companies with more than 50 million monthly users from banning users based on political views.


More:  https://thehill.com/policy/3507216-supreme-court-votes-to-temporarily-block-texas-social-media-law/

Offline jmyrlefuller

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Re: Supreme Court temporarily blocks Texas social media law
« Reply #1 on: June 01, 2022, 12:56:21 am »
I think the law itself needs to be reworded. Scrap the viewer threshold because I don't think that's particularly relevant (and can be gamed) and go by whether it's held by a public corporation.

So if Mark Zuckerberg wants to own Facebook personally as his site, then he can do what he wants. But if he wants to create a public corporation rigged in his favor, as he has, he'll have to follow certain rules.
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