Appeals court upholds Texas' law restricting social content moderation
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A Texas law restricting moderation at social-media platforms has been upheld in federal appeals court, lifting an injunction that had prevented the law from taking effect.
Texas had barred large social-media platforms - those with more than 50M users, such as Facebook parent Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (GOOGL), Snapchat (NYSE:SNAP), Pinterest (PINS) and Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) - from discriminating in their moderation on the basis of viewpoint.
Texas' Republican leadership says the purpose of the law is to protect conservative voices from being silenced on the platform, while the companies and tech groups argue they're being unconstitutionally blocked from removing hate speech including neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan and Russian propaganda screeds.
The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found for Texas, rejecting the companies' "attempt to extract a freewheeling censorship right from the Constitution's free speech guarantee ... The platforms are not newspapers. Their censorship is not speech."
The U.S. Supreme Court put the law temporarily on hold in May, on a 5-4 vote.
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