On Monday, Feb. 26, the Supreme Court was hearing arguments for laws in Texas and Florida that could potentially impact how content is moderated on social media.
Both the Texas law and the Florida law “prohibit online platforms from removing or demoting user content that expresses certain viewpoints.”
The bills were created in 2021 as a response to Donald Trump being banned from certain social media platforms. Those bans were due to his response to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Supporters of the laws saw this as the social media platforms being discriminatory towards certain political viewpoints.
I do not think that these laws should be approved. A problem with the laws presented is that social media companies may not be able to regulate hate speech if it is classified as someone expressing their political opinion. Content moderation in social media plays a very important role in preventing hateful and violent language from being spread to others.
There is also the chance that more misinformation would be spread on social media if these laws were to pass. Someone could spread misinformation under the guise of it being their own political viewpoints.
Besides ways that these laws could affect content on social media websites, it is possible that “the Florida law would also seem to regulate companies like Uber or Etsy that do not publish content.”
The Florida and Texas laws on social media should not be approved because of all the issues that could be caused by them. The definition for someone expressing a political viewpoint and what websites they are trying to restrict are too broad for the laws to really work.
