Evan Spiegel says Snap's decision to stop promoting Trump's account in Discover is within its First Amendment rights
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the legal coda to a decision Snap made a week earlier, when it stopped promoting Trump's account in Discover after his tweet about protesters outside the White House meeting "ominous weapons." Spiegel is now framing that curation call as constitutionally protected speech rather than a neutral hosting choice.
The position is consistent with how Snap has always run Discover: since 2016 it has vetted publishers and used human editors rather than an open feed, and in 2019 Spiegel drew a line against Facebook by saying Snapchat fact-checks all political advertising. Discover is an editorial surface, so pulling a promotion is an editorial act — and Spiegel is claiming the First Amendment covers it.
First-order effects
- Trump's account loses the Discover promotion slot Snap had been giving it, while the account itself stays on the platform — Snap is curating placement, not removing content.
Second-order effects
- The move sharpens the contrast with Facebook's hands-off stance on political content, forcing other platforms with curated surfaces to explain why their promotion decisions differ from neutral hosting.
Third-order effects
- If platforms successfully frame curation as their own protected speech, the political fight shifts from whether they may moderate to how editorially their feeds are built in the first place — favoring human-curated products like Discover over algorithmic feeds in the accountability debate.
The trend: Platforms with human-curated feeds are asserting editorial discretion over political content as protected speech, widening the gap with neutral-hosting rivals like Facebook.