Florida’s law (SB 7072, the Stop Social Media Censorship Act), signed in May 2021, did several things: it prohibited social media companies from banning or de-platforming any political candidates (with fines of $250,000 per day if a statewide candidate is banned)vox.com; it gave the state or individuals a right to sue platforms if they felt content was removed unfairly; and it required companies to publish detailed moderation standards and apply them consistentlyvox.comvox.com. Amusingly, the Florida law also exempted any platform owned by a company that operates a theme park in the state (a carve-out widely seen as a favor to Disney – which owns media platforms – though Disney later incurred DeSantis’s wrath on other issues)vox.com. Governor DeSantis declared Florida was “taking back the virtual public square for free expression”, but civil liberties groups saw it differently. NetChoice and CCIA, tech industry groups, immediately sued Florida, arguing the law violated the First Amendment by forcing private websites to host speech they didn’t wantvox.com. A federal judge agreed and blocked the law in June 2021, and in May 2022 the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld that injunctionvox.comvox.com. The appeals court found that the key provisions of Florida’s law likely infringed the platforms’ constitutional right to decide what content to publish (a form of editorial judgment protected by Supreme Court precedents)vox.com. The court noted it was “substantially likely” the law violated the First Amendment by compelling speech and interfering with editorial discretionvox.com. However, the court did allow minor parts of the law (like requiring platforms to disclose their moderation rules and provide users notice of changes) to take effectvox.com. DeSantis’s administration was not pleased and sought Supreme Court review.
Texas’s law (HB 20), enacted September 2021, was even more aggressive. It forbids large social media platforms (50+ million users) from “blocking, banning, removing, deplatforming, demonetizing, de-boosting, or otherwise discriminating against expression” based on the user’s viewpointscotusblog.comscotusblog.com. In plainer terms, under Texas law a company like Facebook or Twitter cannot remove or down-rank content simply because it’s hate speech or misinformation, if the poster alleges it’s viewpoint discrimination. The law allows Texas residents or the state attorney general to sue platforms for alleged violations. Texas AG Ken Paxton, a vocal conservative firebrand, immediately cast it as a victory for “free speech” against “Big Tech’s censorship.” Tech companies sued Texas as well, and a district judge blocked the law – but in an unexpected twist, in September 2022 the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Texas’s law in a sweeping, iconoclastic decisionitif.orgeff.org. The Fifth Circuit majority reasoned that social platforms are more like common carriers or utilities with no First Amendment right to exclude speech. One judge wrote that the companies “exercise virtually no editorial control” and are not speakers – a view sharply at odds with other courts and expertstechpolicy.press. The ruling stunned many in legal circles, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation calling it “disastrous” and contrary to decades of precedenteff.org. The tech plaintiffs appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily halted Texas’s law from enforcement (in a 5–4 vote) pending full reviewscotusblog.com.
As of 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear both the Florida and Texas social media law cases (NetChoice v. Moody and NetChoice v. Paxton)scotusblog.comscotusblog.com. The Court will decide if states can bar private digital platforms from engaging in content moderation or if such laws violate the First Amendment. The Biden administration has filed in support of the tech companies, arguing these state laws are unconstitutionalscotusblog.com. The outcome will be hugely consequential for online speech: if the Texas law is upheld, platforms might have to host even the vilest content (extremism, propaganda, harassment) with little recourse, undercutting their own community standards. If struck down, it will reaffirm that private entities cannot be forced by governments to carry speech against their will – a fundamental principle of free expression.
Regardless of the legal fate, the political drive behind these laws reflects a narrative cultivated by Trump and Republican legislators: that social media companies – notably Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube – systematically silence conservatives, and thus government must step in. Multiple congressional hearings have been held where Republicans grilled tech CEOs about individual content decisions (like Twitter’s brief 2020 banning of a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, or Facebook’s fact-checks). Often, evidence of an anti-conservative purge is anecdotal or debunked; studies by MIT, Stanford, and even Facebook’s own data have shown right-leaning content often performs extremely well online (sometimes better than left-leaning content)vox.com. As Vox reported, “Research has shown platforms do not discriminate against conservative content.