Supreme Court temporarily blocks Texas’s social media moderation law

It's crazy how a group uniquely obsessed with insulting people by calling them "snowflakes" can so resolutely argue that everyone has to host everything they say, by law, & no one can moderate it.

Interesting breakdown of votes here, with Roberts, Breyer, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Sotomayor voting to temporarily block.

Alito's opposition on the other hand does not tickle me:

> He said the case raises questions of "great importance" concerning a "ground-breaking" Texas law that addresses "the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day."

This idea that just because an online site is popular implies that it should not have powers to moderate itself is... wild.

It's not the court's role, but if anything, it seems again like we need to go look at Competitive Competition/Adversarial Interoperation. If you want an answer, it's not compelling all popular sites to host all content. Letting different sites pick & choose what they'll host, and letting those voices spread, seems like a basic & primitive sensibility. De-duopolize the online channels.

On a personal & somewhat different note, it's been super weird for me entering into this new phase where I kind of get & respect the idea of corporate speech rights? The idea that corporations have rights, like rights to speech, has always seemed vulgar & wrongheaded, felt like another activist Supreme Court picking favorites & granting privileges to the big & the powerful. I'm still not convinced in the unlimited corporate rights ideas, but these modern social issues (I can't quite bring myself to consider them up to the level of 'debates') makes me really understand & sympathize at least somewhat with the idea that corporations need to be able to have some opinions, that the online & other places of the world need some ability to regulate themselves. I was expecting to live & die, polarized to the belief that corporate speech rights were hogwash & a betrayal of democracy. And I'm still not sure their rights involve heavily financing political campaigns. But I at least see a little bit of an idea, that corporate entities have some of their own rights now.

Alito's logic on this is troubling.

"... the case raises questions of “great importance” concerning a “ground-breaking” Texas law that addresses “the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.”

True. As did the penny press in the founders day, as did Yellow Journalism in the early 1900's, as does Fox News and Twitter today.

The fact that these media have the ability to shape public discussion should be a very strong reason for the government to be as hands off as possible.

BTW, I'm not saying the discourse on any of those media is productive or worthwhile, but the fact that Alito considers the influence on public discussion as a possible justification for government intervention is chilling.

It is absolutely not the government's job to compel speech. Not from people and not from corporations.

I'm of mixed mind about this. On one hand, the Texas law seems obviously to compel people to pay for others free speech. That seems to contradict property rights, and also whatever rationale was used to dump the Fairness Doctrine.

On the other hand, I want to see this play out. Like when the Satanic Temple gets statues of Baphomet on state capitals next to displays of 10 commandments and creches, I suspect that internet users have more creativity than Texas lawmakers imagine. I want to see the "not like that!" scrambling from Texas and SCOTUS. I also want to see if Twitter goes the way of Usenet, dying of spam.

Free speech absolutists should try Usenet. See how long that remains enjoyable (again).

Weird. I imagine the vast majority of users want the website to block out the garbage they see (trolling, spam, shills, bots, disinformation).

Without filtering the platform would be unusable noise and die. They need a more nuanced request.