It’s not just book banning
They sure have a funny way of showing their support for the First Amendment:
Texas residents can now sue Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for allegedly censoring their content after a federal appeals court sided Wednesday with the state’s law restricting how social media sites can moderate their platforms.
The 15-word ruling allowing the law, which had been blocked last year, to take effect has significant potential consequences. Most immediately, it creates new legal risks for the tech giants, and opens them up to a possible wave of litigation that legal experts say would be costly and difficult to defend.
Texas’s law makes it illegal for any social media platform with 50 million or more US monthly users to “block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.”
The law creates enormous uncertainty about how social media will actually function in Texas, according to legal experts, and raises questions about what users’ online spaces may look like and what content they may find there, if the companies are even able to run their services at all.
The ruling also sets the stage for what could be a Supreme Court showdown over First Amendment rights and, possibly, a dramatic reinterpretation of those rights that affects not just the tech industry but all Americans — and decades of established precedent.
In short, the decision has allowed Texas to declare open season on tech platforms, with huge ramifications for everyone in the country. It could reshape the rights and obligations of all websites; our relationship to technology and the internet; and even our basic, fundamental understanding of the First Amendment.
The origins of Texas’s law, HB 20, lie in the longstanding Republican criticism that tech platforms discriminate politically against conservative users, a charge the companies have denied and which platform moderation researchers say there is little systemic evidence to support.
The law, which seeks to address the perceived imbalance, was blocked in December by a district court judge who ruled it was unconstitutional under the First Amendment. That decision came months after a similar law, in Florida, was also blocked for the same reason.
But that all changed this week, when in oral arguments at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a three-judge panel confused social media platforms with internet service providers; disputed that Facebook and Twitter are websites; and expressed surprise that a service such as Twitter could “just decide” what content appears on its platform as a matter of course.
The result was Wednesday’s decision overturning the lower-court injunction that had kept Texas’s law from going into effect. The ruling promptly led Texas’s attorney general Ken Paxton — who is also empowered to sue tech companies under HB 20 — to declare victory.”
My office just secured another BIG WIN against BIG TECH,” Paxton’s office tweeted.
The appeals court has not provided a written opinion explaining the decision, and it did not offer the tech advocacy groups who challenged the law time to seek an appeal.”
Apparently, they do not think this is disruptive or something,” said Harold Feld, a senior vice president and communications lawyer at the consumer group Public Knowledge.Whatever happens next, legal experts appear convinced that the outcome will be chaos.
These people are nothing more than chaos agents. They have no clue what they are doing — Paxton is a full blown nutcase — and I fear the Supreme Court radicals don’t either. Fasten your seat belts.
The scope of the law is truly vast, according to legal scholars. It is broad both in terms of its text — explicitly naming at least nine types of prohibited content moderation — as well as its subtext. What does it really mean to “de-boost” or “deny equal visibility”? The ambiguity of those terms provides carte blanche to creative plaintiffs willing to stretch the definitions of the English language, according to Jeff Kosseff, a law professor at the US Naval Academy.”
Just think of all the actions that could be seen as ‘denying equal visibility’ to user content,” Kosseff tweeted.
The state law also forces tech companies to fight the same battles over and over again, prohibiting them from citing a successful defense in one court as a way of nipping similar cases in the bud in other courts.”Those are all things you’d do if you wanted to make litigation as attractive, expensive, and difficult to defend as possible,” said Ken White, a First Amendment lawyer better known as @Popehat on Twitter.
These wingnut courts are about to turn this country upside down and it will take years to right it.