In a piece for Persuasion in early June, First Amendment scholar Nadine Strossen contended that the Supreme Court’s decisions this term could “well determine the shape of speech online for years to come.”
Well, the Court has ruled, the results are in, and what we are left with is… the worst of all possible worlds.
In Moody v. NetChoice/NetChoice v. Paxton, the Court espoused a doctrine in which social media companies are viewed as curators or compilers of online material, with the feed constituting a “distinctive expressive offering”—even when those curatorial choices are in fact made by algorithms or AI tools. That philosophy gives the social media companies carte blanche to moderate—or censor—as they wish. Meanwhile, in the highly consequential case Murthy v. Missouri, the Court found that plaintiffs lacked standing to sue the government even when the government had copiously interfered in tech companies’ moderation practices.
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