A panel of federal circuit judges has upheld a Texas law that limits the ability of social media companies to moderate their platforms and forces them to carry speech they find objectionable in what certainly appears to be a complete violation and abandonment of First Amendment protections for private companies.
The law under review, H.B. 20, regulates large social media platforms (with more than 50 million users) and forbids them from censoring any user based on the viewpoint the user expresses, with some exceptions for child sexual exploitation, specific threats of violence, and any expression that is unlawful. In short, the law treats companies like Twitter and Facebook as "common carriers," ordering them against their will to serve as communication platforms for messages that they might find objectionable or that violate their community standards.
