This is the Katori Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 29th,

2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Following the Supreme Court oral argument over the so-called net choice cases, how might the outcome shape

the future of speech on the internet. I sat down with Cato's Jennifer Huddleston,

Tommy Berry, and David and Sarah to learn where the court might be leaning and why many arguments about treating

internet platforms as so-called common carriers fall flat.

There was a lot going on in the oral argument over what have come to be known simply as the net choice

cases. As you noted in your recent event that I will refer listeners to if they want to dig deep into these cases.

Jennifer, you said there are a lot of cases we could call the net choice cases,

but these two are currently before the Supreme Court.

Before we get into the why. Tommy, if you don't mind, could you just characterize the questions that the court is dealing with.

Sure, so the question presented at the most basic level

is do these two laws, one passed by the Florida

legislature and one passed by the Texas legislature, do they violate the First Amendment

rights of social media websites?

Both of these laws have some differences, but the main similarity is they both restrict

the freedom of social media sites to

moderate the content that appears on their websites, the content that people

upload and that traditionally they have had various rules both through human and algorithmic

moderation to limit things that they want to set is out of bounds and Texas

for example says you have to be viewpoint neutral with those rules so it wouldn't allow a state to distinguish

...