Ordering people to say things the government likes is compelled speech. The First Amendment broadly prohibits it and that broadly benefits <i>us</i>.<p>It's in our interest to safeguard and preserve rights that protect our speech.
If the States win this case, it will be amusing to watch social media sites try to comply with laws banning political censorship in USA also complying with laws in EU mandating political censorship.
This is gonna be a weird ruling if it goes in favor of the states. If you run a public bulletin board tearing down fliers is absolutely a form of speech, and if you do it to people you disagree with it becomes political speech. I can't imagine even this court ruling that the government is allowed to regulate political speech. That would kick the door open to an easily constitutional broadly applied national hate speech law, and reintroduction of the fairness doctrine.<p>So the unintended consequence I expect will be that censoring people for their political views will be the only strongly protected moderation actions.
I feel like, if we are to obligate message boards to host all messages posted on them, then we should also obligate businesses to provide their service to any customer that walks in the door.<p>Yep, that means a bakery would be required by law to provide wedding cakes to people they don't like.<p>Anything less than this is straight up hypocrisy. If you think that a business should have the right to refuse business to anyone... this is what that is lol.
The answer to all of this is to create a federal social media framework modeled after the USPS. This allows private corpos to do their curation but creates an actual public square where speech is free.
I don't think they should be able to have it both ways.<p>Social media companies have speech? If they have speech then why aren't they liable for that speech?