Who Owns the Internet?

This is the question that the US Supreme Court is grappling with as it decides on the fate of two state laws that limit how social media companies can moderate content. Observers believe that the path taken by the judges in these cases could well reshape the internet. Alternatively they could do nothing and maintain the status quo. 

The two parallel cases in question come from Florida and Texas where laws brought by Republican governors instruct the social media companies to stop removing certain kinds of content. If that sounds familiar, all you need to do is look up some of the challenges that have hit the headlines in India, including one from the X platform. 

What exactly is the court deciding upon?

Coming to specifics, Florida’s Senate Bill prevents social media companies from banning political candidates or putting restrictions on their content. In Texas, the House Bill 20 requires these companies to stop removing or demonetizing content based on “viewpoints represented in the user’s expression.” 

The courts in these states ruled in favor of the tech companies while the other sided with the state. The crux of the game was the same though as Republican lawmakers wanted to make social media companies shed their so-called “anti-conservative bias”, accusations that aren’t proven through research but are seen as a result of higher social media use by one party. 

A research study conducted last year into the political behavior across Facebook and Instagram noted that “a “far larger” share of conservative Facebook news content was determined to be false by Meta’s third-party fact-checking system, a result that demonstrates how conservative Facebook users are exposed to far more online political misinformation. 

“…Misinformation shared by Pages and Groups has audiences that are more homogeneous and completely concentrated on the right,” is how the study described it.  

The judges have made some early remarks

These two laws have created a complex tangle as the judges in the Supreme Court will now have to seek legal precedents of rulings long before words like “tweets” or “reels” became part of everyday lexicon. Experts believe that since most laws governing the internet are outdated, the Supreme Court could either end up setting new rules or just completely miss the point. 

In early comments this week, the judges sounded far from convinced about either side though a few like Judge Sonia Sotomayor suggested that these laws covered just about every social media platform on the internet and could end up covering even smartphones that cannot be legally called platforms, and that the readings of the Florida law governs them. 

Other judges too appeared to agree that the terms were too broad and didn’t account for the variety of the internet where even a website like Etsy that sells handicrafts could get impacted by the state laws designed to dictate social media company actions. They also brought up the First Amendment but not as a means to justify the state’s argument. 

The First Amendment signed as law back in 1791 guarantees freedom over religion, expression, assembly of persons and the right to petition to every citizen and forbids Congress to bring laws that go against it. The judges noted that while suppression of speech was not allowed, the law does specifically mention that such suppression cannot be brought by the government. 

What next and how long will it take?

While the hearing did provide some indications around where the justices stand, it does not guarantee anything. Legal experts say the court could either issue a decisive ruling or decline it over paucity of material and send it back to the lower courts for a full trial. Either way, it seems this set of justices would have to face up to the internet age now… or sometime soon. 

Needless to say, what comes out of this court case could set precedents for others in different geographies, including India where the government is working on updating its own laws around the internet and its usage.