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Florida Petitions Supreme Court to Uphold Its Big Tech Free Speech Law
Miami HeraldNo paywall
Florida and major social media companies could be poised for a showdown at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Lawyers for the state Wednesday filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to take up a First Amendment battle about a 2021 Florida law that placed restrictions on industry giants such as Facebook and Twitter.
The state wants justices to overturn a May decision by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that blocked key parts of the law on First Amendment grounds. The appeals court upheld much of a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, who described the law as “riddled with imprecision and ambiguity.”
“Social media has become a dominant method of communication,” the state’s lawyers wrote in the petition. “That dominance, however, comes at a price. When social media companies abuse their market dominance to silence speech, they distort the marketplace of ideas. The question whether the First Amendment essentially disables the states — and presumably the federal government too — from meaningfully addressing those distortions should be answered by this [Supreme] Court, and it should be answered now.”
Lawyers for the state Wednesday filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to take up a First Amendment battle about a 2021 Florida law that placed restrictions on industry giants such as Facebook and Twitter.
The state wants justices to overturn a May decision by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that blocked key parts of the law on First Amendment grounds. The appeals court upheld much of a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, who described the law as “riddled with imprecision and ambiguity.”
“Social media has become a dominant method of communication,” the state’s lawyers wrote in the petition. “That dominance, however, comes at a price. When social media companies abuse their market dominance to silence speech, they distort the marketplace of ideas. The question whether the First Amendment essentially disables the states — and presumably the federal government too — from meaningfully addressing those distortions should be answered by this [Supreme] Court, and it should be answered now.”
“Under the Eleventh Circuit’s reasoning, social-media behemoths have a First Amendment right to cut any person out of the modern town square, for any reason, even when they do not follow their own rules or otherwise act in bad faith,” said the petition, which was posted on the NetChoice website. “That ruling strips states of their historic power to protect their citizens’ access to information, implicating questions of nationwide importance.”