By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-16-22
In a loss for Big Tech and its ad base, a federal appeals court has concluded that corporations do not have a “freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” and so has paved the way for a Texas law (HB 20) that restricts how social media giants moderate their content.
The law, which passed a Republican-controlled legislature last year, “prohibits an interactive computer service from censoring a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person based on … the viewpoint of the user or another person.” It also requires large social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to disclose how they manage content, to publish an acceptable-use policy that users can find telling them what content is acceptable, to publish quarterly transparency reports, and to have a complaint system in place. » Read More