“Florida is on track to be the first state in the nation to punish social media companies that ban politicians like former President Donald Trump under a bill approved Thursday by the state’s Republican-led Legislature.”
There’s a much broader, different-venue, discussion to be had about the facilitation of speech, the public funding of the internet, and the necessity of dissenting and ungoverned voices (Milton’s Areopagitica comes to mind).
This is not it, or, how to get the dialogue started. This is just butt-hurt because companies started to be cagey about some objectionable content.
On April 5, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas kicked off a new round of debate on the right way to regulate social media companies with a thoughtful and creative piece of legal scholarship. His key point is that First Amendment review by the courts might very well uphold a state or federal statute that treated social media platforms as common carriers or places of public accommodation and restricted their ability to remove content on their systems based on political point of view. He did this in the form of a non-binding [concurring opinion]
It’s probably not wise to depend on John Roberts as any kind of conservative bastion. The more likely outcome is he’ll rewrite the Florida law from the bench to force the entire state to subscribe to Twitter.
Social media companies will block Florida IPs. Floridians and Florida business will not be happy with the politicians who made the change. Politicians will reverse course.