This is a republication of a post I originally wrote on May 24, 2023 over on my dedicated blog site that I am rolling into wonksecurity.com.

So it has been more than a little while since I last posted anything. I have been quite busy taking some courses to upskill and have been playing the job market game (along with apparently everyone else in the universe) trying to land my next role. After a busy day, however, I have found it is often a challenge to want to sit down to churn out a post, so to alleviate the barrier to entry on that front, I am going to be introducing what I will simply call “blurbs.”

Blurbs will be short little posts that I make from time to time, often adapted from something I have already shared or come across on social media. My hope is it will let me expand a bit, if necessary, on posts I have made elsewhere. In addition, it will give some much needed activity on this blog in a way that hopefully does not feel as much like overextending after a day of studying and/or being beaten down by the tough job market currently.

So without further delay, let’s jump into the first blurb. Over the weekend, I read a really great piece by Scott Anderson, Quinta Jurecic, Alan Rozenshtein, and Ben Wittes on Lawfare on the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding Gonzalez v. Google, Taamneh v. Twitter, and the Supreme Court’s decision to not take up the broader issue of the Communications Decency Act’s Section 230 liability protections for online platforms. In both cases, the Court was considering major content moderation questions regarding Google and Twitter’s possible liability for terrorist content hosted on their respective platforms.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) has been under a microscope in recent years and received criticism from both Republicans and Democrats, largely for being both overly broad and not broad enough. In political science, when both sides of the aisle are unhappy, you would typically call that a piece of legislation that acts as a good compromise; however, Section 230 keeps coming up again and again in legal cases as the online world continues to rapidly change.

While the Supreme Court, as the Lawfare article points out, punted on the Section 230 questions raised by Gonzalez v. Google and Taamneh v. Twitter, I very much agree that the Supreme Court will likely end up having to finally grapple with Section 230, the so-called “Magna Carta of the Internet,” at some point in the future.

It will be interesting to see if the inevitable battle is closer than it might seem with NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton, which focuses on the issue of Florida’s SB 7072 law, and NetChoice, LLC v. Moody, focusing on Texas’ HB 20 law, both having petitions before the Court over matters pertaining to efforts by Florida and Texas, respectively, to curtail what they view as alleged Internet censorship by social media platforms.

If you’re interested in an overview of those Florida and Texas laws as well as a rundown on what could be at stake if they go into effect, hop over to Lawfare to check out this other article. That article, for which I was a co-author, examines how Florida’s SB 7072 and Texas’ HB 20 could severely limit social media companies in their ability to moderate terrorist/extremist content, targeted harassment and hate speech, as well as disinformation.

Since these laws and others that are pending in other states compel social media platforms to host content or face legal penalties, this could be an area where the Supreme Court may have to decide if the laws are preempted by Section 230 of the CDA. However, I would not be surprised to see another punt on Section 230 if the Court simply decides to keep its ruling (if the Court opts to hear either case at all), narrowly focused on First Amendment considerations, as both cases also touch upon the issue of compelling social media companies to host speech they may not otherwise agree with or think is in the best interest of their companies.