Platforms Can Curate. But What Does “Curate” Mean?
In a ruling that will keep law professors employed for a decade, the Supreme Court held 6-3 that social media platforms retain First Amendment rights to make editorial choices about the content they host, amplify, or suppress. The decision vacated lower court rulings that had upheld Texas and Florida laws restricting how platforms moderate content.
The majority opinion, written by Justice Chen, is long on principle and short on application. Platforms are speakers. Algorithmic curation is speech. States cannot compel platforms to carry content they don't want to carry — at least in the abstract. But the Court sent both cases back to lower courts to apply a new framework that nobody has quite figured out yet.
“The Court has answered the easy question — platforms have rights — and deferred the hard one: when do those rights yield to the public interest in an open internet?”
What the Holding Actually Says
The majority drew an analogy to parade organizers and newspaper editors — entities the Court has previously held cannot be compelled to include speech they disagree with. A platform's decision to recommend, demote, or remove a post is, in the Court's framing, an editorial act protected by the First Amendment.
The dissent, written by Justice Patel, argued that this analogy collapses when applied to platforms that host billions of posts daily and whose “editorial choices” are made by algorithms trained to maximize engagement rather than express viewpoints. “We are not dealing with editors,” Patel wrote. “We are dealing with sorting machines.”
What You Actually Need to Know
- 1If you're in-house at a platform company, the immediate risk of must-carry laws is gone — for now.
- 2The "new framework" the Court mentioned isn't defined. Expect 18 months of lower court chaos.
- 3Section 230 is untouched. This is purely a First Amendment ruling.
- 4The concurrence by Justice Okafor is the one to read. She signals where the Court might draw lines next term.
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