Liberal Vox writer Ian Millhiser panicked Thursday after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a controversial Texas anti-censorship law.
NetChoice was a plaintiff in the suit to stop the law. It sued Texas last year over anti-censorship laws and claimed that they violate the First Amendment. The injunction was overturned by the appellate court this week and the law became effective.
In an op-ed, Millhiser presumptuously argued “two GOP judges” gave Texas the win:
It was a decision. NetChoice v. Paxton reinstates an unconstitutional Texas law that seizes control of the major social media platforms’ content moderation process, requiring them to either carry content that those platforms do not wish to publish or be so restrictive it would render the platforms unusable. The First Amendment forbids government agencies from ordering individuals or private businesses to post speech they don’t want to associate with.
Conservatives that supported the law said it would protect the freedom of speech and not those of Big Tech firms. Millhiser said the ruling threw “the entire social media industry into turmoil” and would force platforms to turn “into 4chan.”
“The Texas law, in other words, would effectively turn every single major social media platform into 4chan — a cesspool of racial slurs, misogyny, and targeted harassment that the platforms would be powerless to control, unless they wanted to enact such sweeping content moderation policies that their platforms would become unusable,” he wrote.
Millhiser admitted reluctantly that social media sites can remove material that encourages or threatens violence.
“Admittedly, the Texas law does permit social media companies to remove some racist and sexist content, but only if that content ‘directly incites criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence,’” he wrote in parentheses.
The Supreme Court likely would get involved soon, but could decide to “write social media out of the First Amendment,” Millhiser concluded. “We should know in very short order, in other words, whether the Supreme Court intends to write social media out of the First Amendment.”
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