Supreme Court to Hear Social Media Cases on Online Speech
Vosem:
My unpopular opinion, which I think I have voiced on this forum before for many years, is that I fail to see how social media companies having the right to moderate at all is consistent with Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins. Pruneyard was based on state constitutional language rather than the federal one, to be sure, but a large majority of states have similar language in their state constitutions.
There is, in fact, a lower-court decision from 2022, NetChoice v. Paxton, which agrees with me, though it's seen as kind of unlikely to be upheld by SCOTUS in its entirety and as going pretty far even by conservative-court standards. This Twitter thread -- which I am quoting in medias res because I like these particular tweets as a summary of the decision, but which is overall fairly hostile to it, but in a fair way and elucidates how radical the decision was relative to current law -- is a pretty good source about it:
https://twitter.com/glakier/status/1572226471443435528var scriptTag = document.getElementsByTagName('script');scriptTag = scriptTag[scriptTag.length-1];atlas_tweetCheckLoad(scriptTag.parentNode, "tw_0_11430925271795993013", "tw_2_15236676991474656924", "https://twitter.com/glakier/status/1572226471443435528");
https://twitter.com/glakier/status/1572226753510412292var scriptTag = document.getElementsByTagName('script');scriptTag = scriptTag[scriptTag.length-1];atlas_tweetCheckLoad(scriptTag.parentNode, "tw_0_20910882661650611729", "tw_2_11250653481764305684", "https://twitter.com/glakier/status/1572226753510412292");
Torie:
Under the SCOTUS Tanner decision (which I argued in moot court in law school and won an award that you very much for my brief in favor of the mall), malls can ban speech in their hallowed halls, so I don't know what the 5th circuit is talking about, and don't want to read the decision. NJ went the opposite route under its state constitution. State constitutions with feel good clauses like freedom and equality and the right to happiness and self actualization and satisfying sex are a bane.
Ferguson97:
Quote from: Vosem on January 20, 2023, 01:25:19 AM
My unpopular opinion, which I think I have voiced on this forum before for many years, is that I fail to see how social media companies having the right to moderate at all is consistent with Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins.
Perhaps because Pruneyard was wrongly decided.
Vosem:
Quote from: Ferguson97 on January 21, 2023, 09:27:46 PM
Quote from: Vosem on January 20, 2023, 01:25:19 AM
My unpopular opinion, which I think I have voiced on this forum before for many years, is that I fail to see how social media companies having the right to moderate at all is consistent with Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins.
Perhaps because Pruneyard was wrongly decided.
Deciding it the other way implies, to me, that a number of 'private right to discrimination' cases were wrongly decided and would put some of the premier Civil Rights-era decisions in jeopardy. (Pruneyard was also a 9-0 case, not some very close-run thing -- as Torie's example, Lloyd, actually was, since that was a narrowly decided 5-4 case. Though in that case it was the 4 most left-wing members in favor of a very expansive right to free speech and the 5 more right-wing members arguing against it -- oh, how the turn tables.)
Quote from: Torie on January 20, 2023, 10:00:50 AM
Under the SCOTUS Tanner decision (which I argued in moot court in law school and won an award that you very much for my brief in favor of the mall), malls can ban speech in their hallowed halls, so I don't know what the 5th circuit is talking about, and don't want to read the decision. NJ went the opposite route under its state constitution. State constitutions with feel good clauses like freedom and equality and the right to happiness and self actualization and satisfying sex are a bane.
I don't really feel like reading the decision either since SCOTUS will have an opinion on this fairly soon, and in fact I never argued Lloyd v. Tanner in moot court, but simply perusing that one it seems like the Supreme Court distinguished the facts from an earlier case, Marsh, having to do with company towns (ie, their argument was that in the Lloyd case that there was not a right to pass out leaflets within the mall because you could do so with equal success outside, whereas in the case of a demonstration in a company town you could not hold a demonstration that got equal attention outside the town). Based on that comparison, modern social media networks seem much more like company towns than malls -- it's not as though a banned poster gets to, like, show you a pop-up when you go to a social media site!
Torie:
I don't see how making social media platforms liable for what others put on them, absent perhaps specific and adequate notice in specific instances, would allow such platforms to continue to exist as an economic matter.
I endorse Vosem's take on Tanner, and indeed made that very distinction with the company town in moot court (the moot court was before SCOTUS came down with its decision).
With social media censorship, the issue is that there are a lot of platforms out there, so there is an "outside" vis a vis a given social platform - another social platform.
Atlas censors speech.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page