Tech industry groups representing Meta and Google ask SCOTUS to overturn the Texas social media content moderation law, arguing it violates the First Amendment
arguing that a Texas law banning “censorship” of viewpoints is unconstitutional. https://www.politico.com/... @netchoice : NEW: Today, NetChoice and co-plaintiff @ccianet asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reject Texas's social media law, HB 20, in our case, NetChoice & CCIA v. Paxton. Read our filing here: https://netchoice.org/... @ccianet : CCIA has filed a brief with the #SCOTUS alongside co-plaintiff @NetChoice in our case against a dangerous Texas social media law, urging the court to uphold a previous decision that ruled the law unconstitutional. https://www.ccianet.org/... https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This filing is the next move in a fight that began in May 2022, when NetChoice and CCIA first went to the Supreme Court seeking an emergency block of Texas HB 20 after a lower court had let parts of it take effect in an earlier emergency application. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton answered by asking the Court to keep the law alive and arguing platforms should be regulated as common carriers under a common-carrier theory.
The December 2022 petition asks the Court to reject the law outright on First Amendment grounds rather than merely pause it. The dispute did not end here: it was later folded into the paired Florida-Texas cases the Supreme Court agreed to hear when it granted review of both state laws, with the Biden administration urging the Court to weigh in on key provisions in a government filing.
First-order effects
- Meta, Google, and other platforms represented by NetChoice and CCIA keep their ability to remove posts and accounts in Texas only if the Court accepts the First Amendment argument; otherwise HB 20 forces them to host viewpoints they would otherwise moderate.
- Texas and AG Paxton get the adversarial hearing they sought when they asked the Court to preserve the law, with the common-carrier framing now tested against the trade groups' speech-rights claim.
Second-order effects
- Florida's parallel content-moderation law rides on the same docket, so whichever way the Court reads the First Amendment question governs both states' statutes at once — a single ruling sets the rule for every state considering similar bills.
- Platforms face divergent state-by-state moderation mandates if the laws survive, forcing either per-state content policies or uniform lowest-common-denominator rules applied nationwide.
Third-order effects
- The eventual outcome defines the constitutional status of content moderation itself — whether curation is protected editorial speech or a neutral utility duty akin to common carriage — which becomes the template for all future state regulation of platform governance.
- SCOTUS's later decision to send both laws back to the lower courts for proper First Amendment analysis rather than settle the merits outright leaves the underlying question open, meaning states and platforms remain locked in a multi-year legal cycle over who controls speech online.
The trend: State legislatures are asserting authority over platform content moderation, and the resulting court battles are forcing a constitutional definition of whether moderation is protected speech or a regulated carrier function.