{"id":6419,"date":"2021-10-26T11:44:24","date_gmt":"2021-10-26T11:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=6419"},"modified":"2021-10-26T11:44:24","modified_gmt":"2021-10-26T11:44:24","slug":"the-texas-social-media-law-is-blatantly-unconstitutional","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=6419","title":{"rendered":"The Texas Social Media Law Is Blatantly Unconstitutional"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\n“Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who..signed a bill<\/a> that aims to restrict<\/a> social media platforms’ editorial discretion, says<\/a> the new law “protects Texans from wrongful censorship” and thereby upholds their “first amendment rights.” The law, H.B. 20<\/a>, is scheduled to take effect on December 2, but that probably will not happen, because it is blatantly unconstitutional and inconsistent with federal law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abbott, a former Texas Supreme Court justice who served as his state’s attorney general from 2002 to 2015, presumably knows that. But whether he is sincerely mistaken or cynically catering to his party’s base, H.B. 20 reflects widespread confusion among conservatives about what the First Amendment requires and allows.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“the First Amendment applies to the government and imposes no constraints on private parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To the contrary, the First Amendment guarantees a private publisher’s right to exercise editorial discretion. The Supreme Court emphasized that point in a 1974 case<\/a> involving a political candidate’s demand that The Miami Herald<\/em> publish his responses to editorials that criticized him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The constitutional protection against compelled publication does not disappear when we move from print to the internet, or from a news outlet to a website that invites users to post their own opinions. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted<\/a> when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, “the Government may not\u2026tell Twitter or YouTube what videos to post” or “tell Facebook or Google what content to favor.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet that is what H.B. 20 purports to do. The law says “social media platforms” with more than 50 million active monthly users in the U.S. may not “censor” content based on the “viewpoint” it expresses. That edict covers any effort to “block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

H.B. 20 makes a few exceptions, including “expression that directly incites criminal activity” and “specific threats of violence” that target people based on their membership in certain protected categories. But otherwise the rule’s reach is vast: As two trade organizations note in a federal lawsuit<\/a> they filed last week, H.B. 20 “would unconstitutionally require platforms like YouTube and Facebook to disseminate, for example, pro-Nazi speech, terrorist propaganda, foreign government disinformation, and medical misinformation.””<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
The Texas Social Media Law Is Blatantly Unconstitutional<\/a><\/blockquote>