The Patriot Post® · Justices Punt on Redlining of Free Speech
Perhaps the biggest battle facing conservatives right now is the suppression of free speech by the leftists who control the public square — i.e., social media platforms. They argue that their free speech rights mean they get to control what’s said on their platforms, even when that interferes with elections, as it did in 2020. But there’s a big hitch in that giddy-up: We built those platforms.
Sure, the men and women who conceived, designed, and launched Facebook, Twitter (now X), Instagram, YouTube, and the rest built and own those platforms. But guess what they’d be without users? MySpace.
Nevertheless, the Big Tech oligarchs treat users’ speech as subject to the whims of “fact-checkers,” who are sometimes not even human. These “fact-checkers” do little more than censor conservative opinion (even humor), and at least on Facebook, there is virtually no recourse to challenge a decision.
You may have heard us complain about this a time or two.
Two key court cases we hoped would provide legal recourse were just punted by the Supreme Court. We had a bad feeling about it, and, sure enough, on Monday, the justices sidestepped ruling on laws in Texas and Florida that sought to restrict the suppression of speech on social media.
It was a double whammy after last week’s decision effectively giving the Biden administration freedom to tell social media companies what to censor. Biden can tell Big Tech what to censor, but states can’t tell Big Tech not to censor. Got it.
Moody v. NetChoice was a challenge to Florida’s law, which blocked platforms from “any action to censor, deplatform, or shadow ban a journalistic enterprise based on the content of its publication or broadcast,” and it required platforms to apply standards “in a consistent manner” — i.e., without bias against one political side. That law was quickly blocked. NetChoice v. Paxton challenged a similar law in Texas, which prohibited viewpoint discrimination but was upheld by a lower court, creating a split.
Neither law has taken effect, and the cases were combined before SCOTUS.
“The parties have not briefed the critical issues here, and the record is underdeveloped,” wrote Justice Elana Kagan for the majority. “So we vacate the decisions below and remand these cases. That will enable the lower courts to consider the scope of the laws’ applications, and weigh the unconstitutional as against the constitutional ones.”
The justices were divided over some of the particulars and several of them wrote concurrences, but every justice agreed on punting the issue back to lower courts. Kagan seemed to accept the plaintiffs’ argument that social media platforms have a First Amendment right to content moderation and, by extension, speech suppression.
So much for the First Amendment rights of users in the public square.
What Big Tech giants have done is essentially create a two-tiered and segregated system for users. Left-wingers can say virtually whatever they want because the “fact-checkers” agree with them. Conservatives, on the other hand, can’t question things like pandemic policy or challenge any of the various state religions of the Left: abortion, the gender cult, or earth worship. We can’t say there are only two genders. We can’t say that the Left’s climate policy is based on phony junk science. Such ideas are specifically suppressed and also lead to an overall algorithmic reduction in who sees any content from “offenders.”
We’re told we can only sit in the back of the bus, and if we keep being so uppity, we can walk.
Unfortunately, litigating against censorship has proven to be tough. Companies do have rights, and the sophisticated and well-funded people running Big Tech giants have invested heavily in protecting their property. Until someone figures out how to craft and defend legislation protecting the free speech of regular people without an army of lawyers at their beck and call, some of us will continue to face the systemic redlining of free speech.