NetChoice v. Paxton (U.S. Supreme Court, 2022)

This case involves a challenge to a Texas law that that seeks to stop social media censorship and would effectively eviscerate the ability of major platforms to engage in meaningful content moderation. ADL joined a coalition amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to prevent the law from going into effect, arguing that the law “decimates platforms’ efforts to effectively and usefully curate content” and “forces disgraceful and wasteful speech onto platform users.” For example, platforms “could not moderate pro-Nazi speech — that is unless they also moderated all content pertaining to political ideologies. They could not moderate speech denying the Holocaust — at least not without banning all content remembering or educating about the Holocaust. They could not remove speech glorifying terrorist attacks against the United States — unless they also remove speech decrying, memorializing, or educating about terrorist attacks against the United States.” As the brief observes, by broadly rejecting “censorship,” this law would render platforms “powerless to stop their private spaces from being used as breeding grounds for radicalization and recruiting of those who will engage in the most terrifying and destructive of acts.”