Supreme Court puts content moderation on solid legal ground

The Supreme Court handed a major, if partial, victory to tech companies this week by ruling that content moderation falls within the First Amendment rights of online platforms. 

Conservative critics of major social media companies have seized on content moderation — particularly around election- and COVID-related topics — as unacceptable censorship that tramples on American speech rights. But on Monday, the high court said efforts by states to restrict the ability of platforms to decide what content appears on the platforms represents an infringement of companies’ rights. 

“States (and their citizens) are of course right to want an expressive realm in which the public has access to a wide range of views,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote on behalf of the court. “But the way the First Amendment achieves that goal is by preventing the government from ‘tilt[ing] public debate in a preferred direction,’ not by licensing the government to stop private actors from speaking as they wish and preferring some views over others.”

The case — Moody v. NetChoice — centers around laws passed by two states, Florida and Texas, that sought to restrict the ability of social media platforms to moderate content, ban users and remove or filter posts.

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