Supreme Court sends Florida, Texas social media regulation laws back to lower courts

July 1 (UPI) -- The Supreme Court on Monday sent back to a lower court a pair of laws from Texas and Florida that seeks to put restrictions on a social media company's ability to moderate content on its own platforms.

"[T]he question in such a case is whether a law's unconstitutional applications are substantial compared to its constitutional ones," Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the court's overall opinion.

The justices, with no official dissents, contend that neither lower court had properly conducted a thorough analysis of the First Amendment challenges to the Florida and Texas bills.

"To make that judgment," Kagan wrote , "a court must determine a law's full set of applications, evaluate which are constitutional and which are not, and compare the one to the other."

The high court's sidestepped 6-3 ruling now sends the two Republican-backed laws back to the lower courts to be re-evaluated on the basis of its challenge to the First Amendment.

"Neither court performed that necessary inquiry," Kagan wrote in Monday's ruling .

The laws were pursued by state lawmakers about three years ago in the wake of Facebook and X, then known as Twitter, banning the accounts of former President Donald Trump after the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building in Washington.

"These years have brought a dizzying transformation in how people communicate, and with it a raft of public policy issues," Kagan said in the court opinion.

U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle in July 2021 first blocked the Florida law less than a day before it was set to take affect, stating his belief it violated the constitution, after it was signed in May by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

"The questions of whether, when, and how to regulate online entities, and in particular the social-media giants, are understandably on the front-burner of many legislatures and agencies," Kagan said, adding that "those government actors will generally be better positioned than courts to respond to the emerging challenges social-media entities pose."

The court's move comes as the Supreme Court days ago rejected 6-3, along its liberal-conservative split, a challenge to the federal government's requests to remove social media misinformation in a case which tested the limits of what the government can do to restrict misinformation content on social media.

The Florida law would require social media companies with $100 million in revenue or 100 million monthly participants to make publicly available their content moderation practices and empowers the Florida Election Commission to impose fines of $250,000 a day on any social media company that bans a statewide candidate and $25,000 a day for banning a non-statewide candidate for office.

"But courts still have a necessary role in protecting those entities' rights of speech, as courts have historically protected traditional media's rights," Kagan's opinion stated.

In May that year, NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association announced that the two had filed a lawsuit to block the law , arguing that the bill -- which would allow fines, lawsuits and other penalties against tech companies that remove Floridians from their platforms -- infringes on free speech and claimed that it was driven by politically motivated opposition to companies' moderation policies.

That was followed in September by the signing of a similar bill by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott , a Republican.

Texas' House Bill 20 targeted social media companies with more than 50 million monthly users, such as Facebook, X and YouTube, which aimed to prevent them from banning users over their politics. It also required companies to disclose their content management and moderation policies, and to implement a complaint and appeals process for content they remove.

On Monday, the CCIA said they were "encouraged" by the court's decision.

In September, the Supreme Court first agreed to hear the case. It set the stage for the First Amendment ruling on what limits, if any, companies have in moderating the kind of speech allowed on their platforms.

"There is nothing more Orwellian than government attempting to dictate what speech should be carried, whether it is a newspaper or a social media site," said CCIA President Matt Schruers, claiming that the country's founding fathers, "understood the importance of the right to speak or not speak without government interference and made this a cornerstone of our democracy when they ratified the First Amendment."

An official with Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute commented that he "was prepared for disaster" ahead of Monday's Supreme Court ruling, but said the "Netchoice decision is good."

"It rejects the broadest arguments made by the states and the platforms," Jameel Jaffer , Knight's director, said on X .

"It recognizes that platforms are 'editors' but dismisses the argument that regulation in this sphere is categorically unconstitutional."

But Monday's Supreme Court ruling was called "not a total blow" to the Florida and Texas laws by a tech author.

However, it was "still a pretty crushing Supreme Court rebuke of the idea that telling tech companies how to moderate content doesn't implicate the First Amendment," Elizabeth Brown, a senior editor at Reason Magazine, posted on X .