SCOTUS has told Texas that it may not regulate global social media platforms – at least for the moment:
The Supreme Court on Tuesday stopped a Texas law that would regulate how social media companies police content on their sites, while a legal battle continues over whether such measures violate the First Amendment. …
Two Washington-based groups representing Google, Facebook and other tech giants filed the emergency request with the Supreme Court on May 13. The Texas law took effect after a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit lifted a district court injunction that had barred it.
The appeals court’s order, which provided no legal reasoning, shocked the industry, which has been largely successful in batting back Republican state leaders’ efforts to regulate social media companies’ content-moderation policies. …
Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Republicans who crafted the law have argued that it will prevent conservative viewpoints from being banned on social media.
Alito said the issue deserves the court’s review: “At issue is a ground-breaking Texas law that addresses the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.” [WaPo]
It’s an interesting issue, and I’ll be eagerly waiting to find out if SCOTUS comes to the same conclusion so many social media proprietors[1], including myself, came to years ago, and that’s this:
People can, and will, vote with their feet.
Which is to say, the history of social media, from BBSes to MySpace to blogs to Facebook to TikTok to Mastodon is not that of stasis, of neverending dominance. It’s of change, change in features, change in capabilities, change in platforms, change in administrative philosophies.
Enhanced features attract people. Bad administration? It repels them.
Disregarding the horrific thought that the States, individually, can possibly regulate a national, nay, international platform, and all the legal mayhem that would result from conflicting State laws, here’s what we, back in the 1980s, observed in a day when we were overlooked by most legislative & regulatory bodies.
A social media platform was popular or unpopular in proportion to several factors: stability, features, availability, social atmosphere, and administrative style. The last area is the area of interest here. What does it encompass?
It was often defined by the edges of acceptable conversation as defined by the platform. On one end were those systems which essentially did not exercise any restraints. Even calls contaminated with static were considered valid contributors to discussion.
And on the other end were authoritarian administrators who tightly controlled subjects of discussion and would delete public correspondence that didn’t meet their high-handed standards.
And, most importantly for SCOTUS, I’ll tell you what: people didn’t hesitate to walk when they felt administrators behaved in an unfair manner. Someone had a viewpoint and presented it, and so long as it was presented honestly and didn’t touch on a few high-voltage subjects, it was resented if it was deleted. If this happened more than a few times, people walked.
And then new social media sites would go up in response to sites run in an authoritarian manner.
Put together the willingness of users to move on to other sites, such as is happening with Facebook right now as they lose the younger generation to TikTok and other platforms, which I probably have not yet heard, and the solution to the problem appears to be self-regulation, much like most private enterprise.
And this is a far better solution than government-specified speech requirements. If Facebook is required to specify Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid, however futile it is, because someone says that’s a conservative viewpoint and shouldn’t be repressed just because no scientific studies support it, and other studies suggest Ivermectin has its own dangers for the human organism, well, take a deep breath, who the hell should be held responsible when people start dying?
Facebook?
Faceless, if you’ll excuse the ineluctable wordplay, conservatives who proclaim this grift to be a legitimate conservative viewpoint?
SCOTUS??????????????
Small government conservatives asking for more government that will be ineffectual because there’ll be no useful metric for measuring its worth. That may be the pinnacle of irony. Watch out for avalanches.
I sure hope SCOTUS figures this out. There’s nothing necessarily permanent about any of these social media companies; if they make enough chronic errors, they’ll be out on their noses.
1 Also known as BBS operators, sysops, etc.
