Marshall Chair of Constitutional Law Randy Beck has offered insight on the U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding Moody v. NetChoice & NetChoice v. Paxton:
“The Court remanded both cases for further proceedings, concluding that the lower courts had not conducted a sufficiently thorough analysis of the reach of the Texas and Florida laws to determine whether they were facially invalid under the First Amendment.
A majority of the Court concluded that Texas' law violates the First Amendment to the extent it interferes with a social media company's content moderation decisions concerning what content will appear in places like Facebook's news feed or YouTube's home page.
Where a social media company curates content produced by other people, its content moderation decisions are expressive activities protected by the First Amendment, even if it is relatively permissive in the standards it applies. Such content moderation decisions are analogous to editorial decisions made by journalists or decisions about what messages to include or exclude in a privately-organized parade. The First Amendment does not allow the government to regulate such private expressive decisions to achieve what the government sees as a better or more inclusive mix of views.”
Beck is available for further commentary at rbeck@uga.edu.