A social media platform is like a telegraph, Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielson told the Supreme Court on Monday, defending his state's restrictions on content moderation by Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube. Former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, speaking on behalf of the tech trade group NetChoice, rejected that comparison, saying a social media platform is more like a newspaper.
Neither of those analogies is entirely satisfying. But Clement's has the advantage of recognizing that Facebook et al., unlike "dumb pipes" that simply transmit messages, unavoidably curate a vast amount of content, exercising the sort of editorial discretion that the Supreme Court has said is protected by the First Amendment.
