This may NOT be good if the Alito 5 stick together and keep making Right Turns on basic ‘Rights’ issues. that HAD been settled for decades…
Congress can’t deal with much of ANYTHING these days with RightWingNuts trying run the place on it’s own gunning up the work’s….
Tech industry groups, whose members include Facebook and Google’s YouTube, asked the court to block Texas and Florida laws passed in 2021 that regulate companies’ content-moderation policies. The companies say the measures are unconstitutional and conflict with the First Amendment by stripping private companies of the right to choose what to publish on their platforms….
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The justices’ ruling could have significant implications for the future of democracy and elections, as Americans increasingly rely on social media to read and discuss political news. It could also have wide-ranging implications for policymakers in Congress and statehouses around the country as they attempt to craft new laws governing social media and misinformation.
As Congress has remained deadlocked on those issues, states are playing a larger role in governing digital privacy, artificial intelligence and social media. Democrats largely have argued that the companies are not doing enough to root out hate speech and other harmful content online, and they have passed laws in California and New York to force greater transparency of the companies’ rules and decisions….
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The First Amendment generally protects against government infringement on speech. Courts have also held that private companies, including newspapers and broadcasters, have the right to control the speech they publish and disseminate. That includes the right of editors not to publish something they don’t want to publish.
The Texas law, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R), allows state residents and the attorney general to sue large social media companies if they believe they were unfairly banned or censored from a platform. A similar Florida law would penalize social media companies for blocking a politician’s posts….