From Brazil to Texas, politicians are trying to throw out platforms’ ability to moderate content
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked a controversial Texas law with dramatic implications for the content moderation processes of the world’s largest social media companies.
The legislation prohibits social media platforms with more than 50 million active monthly users — such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube — from taking down posts that express a user’s “viewpoint.” It also allows Texans, as well as the state, to sue companies that violate this prohibition. Upon signing the bill, Texas governor Greg Abbott denounced “a dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas” and invoked the law as a way to defend free speech. Critics say the legislation would effectively bar social media sites from taking down content altogether — including propaganda and hate speech — and violates companies’ rights to moderate the material posted by their platforms’ users, which are codified in Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
But Texas isn’t the only jurisdiction to try, and fail, to regulate platforms’ content moderation policies in response to allegations of conservative censorship. An appeals court put a similar Florida law on pause a few weeks ago.
And at the global level, this is nothing new. In Brazil last year, Congress overturned an order signed by President Jair Bolsonaro prohibiting social media companies from taking down users’ content without a court order. Announcing the decision on its official Twitter page, the Brazilian government claimed it was “taking the global lead in defending free speech on social networks.”