#323: Florida & Texas vs. the Internet

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last year, Florida and Texas passed draconian social media speech regulations. Each law violates the First Amendment, and, not surprisingly, each was blocked by a federal trial court. On appeal, however, things got weird. Although one appellate court affirmed most of the ruling against Florida’s law (SB 7072), another let Texas’s (HB 20) go into immediate effect. In an emergency order, the Supreme Court re-blocked the Texas law—for now. A further ruling by the justices, probably next year, is all but inevitable. TechFreedom’s Corbin Barthold and Ari Cohn break down the situation. For more, see a recent article by Corbin, “Trumpism on the Bench?,” published at The Bulwark; a recent article by TechFreedom’s Berin Szóka, “Mass Shooting Videos Are Protected Under These Awful Laws,” published at The Daily Beast; and Corbin’s and Berin’s joint essay “No, Florida Can’t Regulate Online Speech,” published at Lawfare.

Transcript

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0:00.0	For more than a year now, we've talked periodically on the show about Florida's and Texas's social media laws.
0:14.2	We started in March 2021 before either law was even passed.
0:19.3	The two laws are Florida's SB 7072 and Texas's HB20. They were both
0:26.6	promptly subject to legal challenge. Those lawsuits have moved through the courts comparatively
0:32.5	quickly. And as we'll be discussing today, it appears that the two cases are on a crash course to the Supreme Court,
0:40.5	and that they will someday soon be the subject of a landmark high court ruling on free speech and the internet.
0:48.6	So, briefly, how did we get here?
0:52.2	Florida's SB 7072 and Texas's HB20 each take aim at supposed big tech censorship, quote, unquote.
1:02.5	Accordingly, each contains a thicket of rules intended to block or discourage the largest social media platforms from moderating content.
1:12.8	SB 7072 says, for instance, that a platform may not remove any post by a, quote,
1:19.6	journalistic enterprise, a term defined so is to cover most any popular website.
1:26.1	Florida's law also requires platforms to moderate content in a, quote, consistent manner.
1:32.1	Good luck figuring out what that means.
1:35.4	HB20, for its part, a bar is a platform from moderating content on the basis of viewpoint.
1:42.8	It thus would seem to place terrorist propaganda on a par with news stories about terrorism,
1:48.7	mass shooter manifestos on a par with appeals for racial harmony or gun control,
1:55.0	pro-anorexia content on a par with its opposite, and so on.
2:00.0	Allow the latter, and under HV20, you must allow the former.
2:04.8	Each law was challenged in court and each was blocked. Quote, the state has asserted it is on the
2:11.4	side of the First Amendment, wrote the trial judge in the Florida case, but the assertion is
2:16.8	wholly at odds with accepted constitutional
2:19.2	principles. Quote, social media platforms have a First Amendment right to moderate content
	...

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