A federal appeals court upheld the validity of a Texas social media law that companies like Meta Platforms Inc. and Twitter Inc. say will prevent them from blocking hate speech and extremism.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans on Friday lifted a lower court injunction that had blocked the legislation from taking effect.
The Texas law bars social media platforms with more than 50 million users from discriminating on the basis of viewpoint. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republicans argue the legislation is needed to protect conservative voices from being silenced. But tech groups say the measure unconstitutionally bars platforms from removing neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan screeds or Russian propaganda about its invasion of Ukraine.
“We reject the platforms’ attempt to extract a freewheeling censorship right from the Constitution’s free speech guarantee,” a panel of judges on the appeals court said. “The platforms are not newspapers. Their censorship is not speech.”
The judges remanded the case back to the lower court for further proceedings, consistent with their opinion.
NetChoice, a trade group representing internet companies, didn’t have an immediate comment.
Abbott signed the legislation a year ago as part of a broader Republican push against what the party sees as censorship of its viewpoints.
Critics of the law, known as HB20, have said it will wreak havoc on social media platforms by removing their ability to moderate and remove content that falls outside user guidelines. It would also allow Texas residents to sue platforms if posts are removed by claiming that their content is being censored.
The law runs counter to rising pressure on social media platforms to tighten their rules on content moderation and more effectively ban posts that incite violence or harm. This week, executives from Meta, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok testified before a Senate committee and faced questions over what the companies are doing to protect users.
A similar law in Florida was struck down by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, and the tech companies urged the New Orleans court to follow suit.
“We will not,” the New Orleans panel wrote. “Florida’s and Texas’s laws are very different.”
