A federal judge has temporarily blocked Florida’s new “Big Tech” law from being enforced, a major setback for one of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s top priorities this year.
In a preliminary injunction issued Wednesday night, Judge Robert Hinkle granted the request from online-industry group NetChoice in their suit against the controversial law.
“The plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits of their claim that these statutes violate the First Amendment,” Hinkle wrote. “There is nothing that could be severed and survive.”
The law, signed last month by DeSantis and scheduled to go into effect Thursday, would slap daily fines of $100,000 on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Amazon for each statewide political candidate removed from their platforms, and $10,000 a day for other candidates.
DeSantis said the bill was necessary to provide accountability from “Big Brother.” But critics of the law have denounced the measure as a violation of the First Amendment, and Hinkle agreed.
“First, the State has asserted it is on the side of the First Amendment; the plaintiffs are not,” Hinkle wrote. “It is perhaps a nice sound bite. But the assertion is wholly at odds with accepted constitutional principles. ... The First Amendment does not restrict the rights of private entities not performing traditional, exclusive public functions. So whatever else may be said of the providers’ actions, they do not violate the First Amendment.”
Hinkle said the plaintiffs’ allegation that the actual motivation for the law was Republican lawmakers’ hostility to social media platforms’ “perceived liberal viewpoint” had “substantial factual support.”
“Thus, for example, the Governor’s signing statement quoted the bill’s sponsor in the House of Representatives: ‘Day in and day out, our freedom of speech as conservatives is under attack by the ‘big tech’ oligarchs in Silicon Valley. But in Florida, we said this egregious example of biased silencing will not be tolerated.’ ... This viewpoint-based motivation ... subjects the legislation to strict scrutiny, root and branch.”
He also wrote that the state gave no basis for why it applied the law only to the largest companies such as Facebook and Twitter. He also criticized the provision of the bill that exempts companies that own a theme park, such as Walt Disney Co., which runs Disney+, a streaming service.
“Despite the obvious constitutional issue posed by the exclusion, the Legislature adopted it, apparently unwilling to subject favored Florida businesses to the statutes’ onerous regulatory burdens,” Hinkle wrote.
Many of the posts removed by Facebook, Twitter and others over the past year have been part of conspiracy accounts boosting QAnon and former President Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Trump was removed from Twitter, Facebook and other platforms for inciting the Jan. 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol.
This is not the first major injunction Hinkle has ordered for a Florida law. His orders temporarily held up a law passed by the Legislature and signed by DeSantis that required former felons to pay back all fines, fees and restitution before being allowed to vote, despite the passage of Amendment 4.
However, the state appealed a federal court in Atlanta ultimately ruled the law could stand.
