Texas have some social media moderation law that is called HB 20. It was stopped by a court. Lots of good things in the ruling. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211202/00403748039/texas-court-gets-it-right-dumps-texass-social-media-moderation-law-as-clearly-unconstitutional.shtml
This is for the common carrier troll.
This Court starts from the premise that social media platforms are not common carriers. “Equal access obligations . . . have long been imposed on telephone companies, railroads, and postal services, without raising any First Amendment issue.” United States Telecom Ass’n v. Fed. Commc’ns Comm’n, 825 F.3d 674, 740 (D.C. Cir. 2016). Little First Amendment concern exists because common carriers “merely facilitate the transmission of speech of others.” Id. at 741. In United States Telecom, the Court added broadband providers to its list of common carriers. Id. Unlike broadband providers and telephone companies, social media platforms “are not engaged in indiscriminate, neutral transmission of any and all users’ speech.”
Id. at 742.
HB 20’s pronouncement that social media platforms are common carriers… does not impact this Court’s legal analysis.
Social media can stop you bagging on their platforms if they want to.
Social media platforms have a First Amendment right to moderate content disseminated on their platforms. See Manhattan Cmty. Access Corp. v. Halleck, 139 S. Ct. 1921, 1932 (2019) (recognizing that “certain private entities[] have rights to exercise editorial control over speech and speakers on their properties or platforms”).
The State’s first interest fails on several accounts. First, social media platforms are privately owned platforms, not public forums. Second, this Court has found that the covered social media platforms are not common carriers. Even if they were, the State provides no convincing support for recognizing a governmental interest in the free and unobstructed use of common carriers’ information conduits. Third, the Supreme Court rejected an identical government interest in Tornillo. In Tornillo, Florida argued that “government has an obligation to ensure that a wide variety of views reach the public.” Tornillo, 418 U.S. at 247–48. After detailing the “problems related to government-enforced access,” the Court held that the state could not commandeer private companies to facilitate that access, even in the name of reducing the “abuses of bias and manipulative reportage [that] are . . . said to be the result of the vast accumulations of unreviewable power in the modern media empires.” Id. at 250, 254.
