The US Supreme Court on Tuesday put back on hold a controversial Texas law barring social media platforms from "censoring" posts based on viewpoints.
The law threatens to essentially make it a
crime for social media platforms to curb hate speech or bigoted tirades, or
even point out when posts are demonstrably false.
Political conservatives have accused
Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants of stifling their voices,
providing no evidence to support the claims.
Social media platforms have consistently
defended themselves against such accusations, saying content moderation
decisions are based on factors such as risk of real-world harm.
Former US president Donald Trump was booted
from Facebook and Twitter after a group of his supporters attacked the Capitol
on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to prevent his rightly elected successor Joe
Biden from taking office.
People died during the attack, and there
were concerns Trump would use social media to incite further violence.
The Texas law bars social media platforms
with more than 50 million users from banning people based on their political
viewpoints.
NetChoice trade association, whose members
include Amazon, Facebook and Google, challenged the law and convinced a federal
court in Texas to stop it from being enforced until it was resolved whether it
runs afoul of the US Constitution's First Amendment.
An appeals court later sided with Texas,
saying the state could go ahead with the law, prompting the matter being taken
to the Supreme Court.
The top court in the United States on
Tuesday backed the original decision to put Texas law HB 20 on hold while the
question of whether it should be tossed out completely is resolved.
"Texas's HB 20 is a constitutional
trainwreck — or, as the district court put it, an example of 'burning the house
to roast the pig,'" NetChoice counsel Chris Marchese said in a release.
"Despite Texas's best efforts to run
roughshod over the First Amendment, it came up short in the Supreme
Court."
NetChoice welcomed the decision, which
sends the case back to a district court in Texas to hear arguments regarding
the law's constitutionality.
In its original decision about the stay,
the district court said social media platforms have a right to moderate content
disseminated on their platforms, and that a provision against putting warning
labels on misinformation even risked violating the free speech rights of
internet firms.
"Texas's law violates the First
Amendment because it compels social media companies to publish speech they
don't want to publish, and because it prevents them from responding to speech
they disagree with," said attorney Scott Wilkens at Columbia University's
Knight First Amendment Institute.
"In addition, the theory of the First
Amendment that Texas is advancing in this case would give government broad
power to censor and distort public discourse."