THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

The Eleventh Circuit ruling focuses on whether Florida's law -- which heavily restricts suspensions, fact-checking, and content removal involving political candidates and media enterprises -- plausibly violates the First Amendment. Florida's defense of the law characterizes web platforms as quasi-governmental public spaces or "common carriers" akin to a phone company, making their moderation calls (in its line of reasoning) ineligible for First Amendment protection. The ruling, delivered by Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom, disagrees.

"Platforms are private enterprises, not governmental (or even quasi-governmental) entities," declares Newsom's opinion. "No one has a vested right to force a platform to allow her to contribute to or consume social media content." The court also determines that "social media platforms aren't 'dumb pipes'" -- in other words, they're not common carriers. Instead, they're digital spaces that are actively curating a community by creating terms of service and deciding how to deliver and prioritize content. In Newsom's words, "when a platform selectively removes what it perceives to be incendiary political rhetoric, pornographic content, or public-health misinformation, it conveys a message and thereby engages in 'speech' within the meaning of the First Amendment."

As Mike Masnick at Techdirt lays out, the ruling tears apart much of the legal logic that's underpinned conservative attempts to restrict social network content moderation. It also addresses a particular concern that cropped up after the recent shooting in Buffalo: whether these laws would force platforms to carry a video of the mass murder. The answer, it concludes here, is yes. "SB 7072 would seemingly prohibit Facebook or Twitter from removing a video of a mass shooter's killing spree if it happened to be reposted by an entity that qualifies for 'journalistic enterprise' status," writes Newsom.

That's not the end of the problems, either. In one section, the ruling notes that "the provision is so broad that it would prohibit a child-friendly platform like YouTube Kids from removing -- or even adding an age gate to -- softcore pornography posted by PornHub, which qualifies as a 'journalistic enterprise' because it posts more than 100 hours of video and has more than 100 million viewers per year."

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