A court in Texas has ruled that individuals can sue social media platforms like Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) for so-called "censorship". For years, Republican pundits and lawmakers have argued that these platforms target and censor conservative speech, but the evidence doesn't support their claims.
The legislation allowing citizens to sue for social media censorship was first signed into law by Texas's Republican Governor, Greg Abbott. However, the law was soon challenged in court by tech company trade groups who argue that the law will prevent them from removing extremism and hate speech. Most recently, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled against the groups' complaint.
"Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say," wrote U.S. Circuit Court Judge Andrew Oldham.
A similar law was passed in Florida last year, but, unlike the Texas law, the Florida legislation was tossed out by the court. Now that the Texas law has passed the initial hurdle, its likely to go on to the Supreme Court.
"We remain convinced that when the U.S. Supreme Court hears one of our cases, it will uphold the First Amendment rights of websites, platforms, and apps," Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel for NetChoice, one of the companies challenging the law.
While Texas and Florida has been the first states to pass laws against social media conservative censorship, Republicans in several other states hope to follow suit.
"I'll just cut to the chase, Big Tech is out to get conservatives," Ohio Republican Congressman Jim Jordan said. "That's not a hunch. That's not a suspicion. That's a fact."
It's unclear what facts Jordan is referencing here. As NPR reports, there are two primary ways that conservatives say platforms are censoring their speech: through mass deletion of conservative posts or by stifling conservative post engagement.
While there is no proof to support the first claim, the second claim is provably false. Facebook, for instance, has said for years that conservative posts perform better on its site.
"Right-wing populism is always more engaging," a Facebook executive said in a 2020 interview with Politico. The executive said conservative content triggers "an incredibly strong, primitive emotion" through its focus on "nation, protection, the other, anger, fear."
The issue of whether or not users on social media favor conservative speech is a complicated one. Based on things like the number of likes and views, conservative posts do perform better, but that doesn't take into account how engaged users are with the information.
According to Duncan Watts, a University of Pennsylvania researcher who was given access to Facebook's private data, most of the popular content it "mainstream", but he added that, "If anything, there is a bias in favor of conservative content."