Whatever happens next, legal experts appear convinced that the outcome will be chaos. “Apparently, they do not think this is disruptive or something,” said Harold Feld, a senior vice president and communications lawyer at the consumer group Public Knowledge. The appeals court has not provided a written opinion explaining the decision, and it did not offer the tech advocacy groups who challenged the law time to seek an appeal. “My office just secured another BIG WIN against BIG TECH,” Paxton’s office tweeted. The ruling promptly led Texas’s attorney general Ken Paxton - who is also empowered to sue tech companies under HB 20 - to declare victory. The result was Wednesday’s decision overturning the lower-court injunction that had kept Texas’s law from going into effect. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (2R) and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt (2L) speak to reporters in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on April 26, 2022. That decision came months after a similar law, in Florida, was also blocked for the same reason.īut that all changed this week, when in oral arguments at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a three-judge panel confused social media platforms with internet service providers disputed that Facebook and Twitter are websites and expressed surprise that a service such as Twitter could “just decide” what content appears on its platform as a matter of course. The law, which seeks to address the perceived imbalance, was blocked in December by a district court judge who ruled it was unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The origins of Texas’s law, HB 20, lie in the longstanding Republican criticism that tech platforms discriminate politically against conservative users, a charge the companies have denied and which platform moderation researchers say there is little systemic evidence to support. It could reshape the rights and obligations of all websites our relationship to technology and the internet and even our basic, fundamental understanding of the First Amendment. In short, the decision has allowed Texas to declare open season on tech platforms, with huge ramifications for everyone in the country. The ruling also sets the stage for what could be a Supreme Court showdown over First Amendment rights and, possibly, a dramatic reinterpretation of those rights that affects not just the tech industry but all Americans - and decades of established precedent. The law creates enormous uncertainty about how social media will actually function in Texas, according to legal experts, and raises questions about what users’ online spaces may look like and what content they may find there, if the companies are even able to run their services at all.
Texas’s law makes it illegal for any social media platform with 50 million or more US monthly users to “block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.”
Federal appeals court restores Texas's social media censorship law
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