The Supreme Court said Friday it will rule on how the First Amendment applies to social media and decide whether Texas and Florida can impose stiff fines on Facebook, You Tube and other popular sites for allegedly discriminating against conservatives.

The justices said they would review the new and never-enforced laws of the two largest Republican-controlled states and decide whose rights to free speech are at stake.

Lawmakers in Texas said the social media sites conspired to censor conservative voices and views, sometimes at the behest of the Biden White House.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said “conservative statements” were under threat. “It is now the law that conservative views in Texas cannot be banned on social media,” he said at the bill signing in 2021.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said his state’s law would hold accountable “Big Tech censors” who “discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology.”

The law, passed before billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter and changed its name to “X,” applies to social media sites with more than $100 million in annual revenue or more than 100 million users.

It allows lawsuits for damages for “unfair censorship” and steep fines if a social media site “deplatforms” a candidate for office, as happened for a time to former President Trump after he continued to spread false claims about the 2020 election.

Both state laws ran counter to each other

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1st Amendment challenges from the tech industry, and the Supreme Court stayed them in a 5-4 order last year.

“Throughout our country’s history, the First Amendment freedoms of speech and press have protected the right of private entities to choose whether and how to publish and distribute speech generated by others,” attorneys for the social media sites said in the call in Texas.

It concerns the basic legal status of social media sites. Are they private companies with complete freedom of speech to shape their content, similar to a newspaper or TV network?

Or are they ‘common carriers’, such as telephone companies, with a duty to be equally open to all points of view and subject to government regulation?

Until now, the First Amendment and federal law have been thought to protect free speech online by prohibiting government regulation or filing lawsuits against social media platforms.

But Justice Clarence Thomas has suggested that the sites of ‘dominant digital platforms’ should be seen as common carriers subject to regulation.

“There is a valid argument that some digital platforms are sufficiently related to regular airlines or lodging places to be regulated,” he wrote when the court heard a case called Biden vs. Knight rejected. Google and Facebook have enormous reach, he said. “Similar to a communications program, this concentration gives some digital platforms enormous control over speech.”

Netchoice, a coalition of major internet companies that also includes Amazon, Google and Meta, has filed a lawsuit with the Computer & Communications Industry Association to block both laws.

The South’s two federal appeals courts, through Trump appointees, split on the issue of free speech.

U.S. Judge Kevin Newsom, speaking on behalf of the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta, blocked most of the Florida law from taking effect, saying it was unconstitutional.

The First Amendment “restricts government actors and protects private actors,” he said. Social media sites are private companies, and “simply put, with minor exceptions, the government cannot tell a private individual or entity what to say or how to say it.”

Shortly after Florida passed its law, Texas passed a measure stating that a social media platform with more than 50 million users in the United States cannot censor users’ speech… or otherwise discriminate based on their viewpoint.

The law’s targets appear to include YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, as well as Facebook and X, formerly Twitter. Violators could be subject to daily fines and lawsuits filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton.

U.S. Judge Andrew Oldham, speaking on behalf of the 5th Circuit Court in New Orleans, upheld the Texas law on the grounds that the state wanted to protect Texans’ free speech.

A former counsel to Governor Abbott and law clerk to Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., Oldham said it is a “rather strange inversion of the First Amendment” to say that social media platforms have the “right to muzzle their views … We reject the idea that companies have a free-wheeling 1st Amendment right to censor what people say.”

Both state measures also require social media sites to disclose how they decide to remove information or users. That part of the Florida law was not blocked by the lower courts.

Last year, the Supreme Court seemed deeply divided on the issue. The justices suspended the Texas law while the appeals continued.

Social media sites insist they merely exercise “editorial judgment” to remove objectionable material.

They argued that it was both unconstitutional and practically impossible for the website to provide individualized explanations for each item that was removed.

During six months in 2018, Facebook, Google and Twitter took action on more than 5 billion accounts or submissions, including 3 billion cases of spam, 57 million cases of pornography, 17 million cases of child safety content and 12 million cases of extremism. hate speech and terrorist speech,” they told the court.

On Friday,

the justices said they had agreed to review both laws. They will hear arguments early next year. The Florida case is Moody vs. NetChoice, while the case of Texas Netchoice vs. Paxton is.

Trump and 16 Republican-led states filed friend-of-the-court briefs urging the justices to uphold Florida’s law.

Concerns about social media are not limited to conservative states.

Last year, the California Legislature passed measures to protect children and teens online and require social media sites to disclose their “content moderation practices,” which include hate speech, racism, extremism, disinformation and harassment.

California will not stand by while social media is weaponized to spread hate and disinformation that threatens our communities and fundamental values ​​as a country, governor says. Gavin Newsom said as he signed the bill. Californians deserve to know how these platforms influence our public discourse, and this action brings much-needed transparency and accountability to the policies that shape the social media content we consume every day.