Florida’s laws were still blocked, and the state was very interested in the outcome of the battle for Texas. Florida on Wednesday filed a Summary of the Supreme Court in favor of Texas, and the Florida summary was signed by 11 other states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, and South Carolina.
“The Amici states have a strong interest in protecting sovereign states’ regulatory authority in this area,” the Florida summary report said. “Indeed, many states have enacted, or are considering, laws similar to those of Texas and Florida, and believe Fifth Street is correct in upholding the district court order pending appeal.”
The Texas law applies to social media platforms with “more than 50 million active users in the United States in a calendar month.” It states that “social media platforms may not censor users” based on a user’s “opinion”, and defines “moderators” as “blocking, banning, removing, unformatting, unearthing money, de-enhancement, restriction, denial of equal access or visibility to , or discrimination against wording.” By law, users or the Texas attorney general can sue platform violating the ban.
Texas Complaints First Amendment does not apply
The Texas summary argues that the country’s law banning “opinion-based” censorship does not violate First Amendment because it “regulates conduct, not speech — specifically, the platform’s refusal to provide providing or reducing discrimination and service to classes of customers based on opinion First Amendment generally does not prevent restrictions on ‘conduct’, even if they do impose them.[e] random burden of speech. ‘ Because the Hosting Rule only requires platforms to serve customers on a non-discriminatory basis, it’s ‘completely legal for a Government to do’ – even if the service the platforms provided is “archive someone else’s speech.”
Texas states that social networks cannot rely on “editing at will” because “platforms have spent years disclaiming responsibility or editorial control over their user-generated content.” .” Texas also argued that an “entity does not exercise ‘editorial rights’ by controlling communications between third parties. Even if platforms exercise some degree of editorial power by hosting other people’s speech, they still won’t have “editorial discretion” to be free from a restriction how they control user communication with each other. “Social platforms “are built for the specific purpose of hosting third-party speech and are ‘open to the public to come and go as they please,'” Texas wrote.
Texas says its case is supported by the Supreme Court PruneYard decision regarding a shopping mall that prohibits guests from engaging in expressive activity that is not directly related to [the mall’s] commercial purposes, “in violation of California’s law prohibiting shopping malls from infringing upon the right” of speech and petitions “of the visiting public.” Texas continues:
This court rejected the mall’s argument that it was entitled to a “First Amendment right not to be coerced by the State to use [its] property as a forum for the speech of others. “This court found that California’s storage requirement did not violate the mall’s right of speech for three reasons. First, because the mall “is open to the public to come and go at will.” No any reasonable viewer could associate any given speaker’s point of view with the point of view of the mall itself.Second, California does not require the mall to hold a “specific message” “; instead, State law applies equally to all potential speakers and messages. Third, the mall remains free to “expressly reject any association with” a disparaging speaker or message…
