Texas's social media anti-censorship law goes into effect with an uncertain path forward

Will this unleash even more abuse into your timeline?

More than half a year after it was signed, a new state law has been allowed to take effect that would punish social media companies for banning Texas citizens off their platforms for expressing a "viewpoint." Big Tech has been pushing back along the way and now hopes that the Supreme Court will step in to block it.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association and lobbying group NetChoice — whose members include Amazon, Google, Meta, and Twitter — have filed with the Supreme Court for an injunction against the law (via Axios) after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this week denied the parties' request for a stay of enforcement. The two groups filed an earlier suit in district court, still ongoing, challenging the constitutionality of the law.

The law, filed by the Texas legislature as H.B. 20 and signed in September by Governor Greg Abbott, targets platforms with at least 50 million monthly active users prohibiting censorship as such:

A social media platform may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person based on:(1) the viewpoint of the user or another person;(2) the viewpoint represented in the user ’s expression or another person ’s expression; or(3) a user ’s geographic location in this state or any part of this state.

Platforms must also publish detailed transparency reports about their moderation practices, including about content removal and account suspensions. Enforcement is incumbent upon the aggrieved user to either file suit against the platform in question or seek to have the state attorney general to do so.Republicans largely backed the bill as a method to combat perceived anti-conservative bias on internet platforms. Social site operators are concerned that the law limits their ability to manage hateful or offensive content as provided under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.There are questions as to whether the law is too vague or over-broad as consequences continue to flow from Saturday's mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, which left 10 dead and 3 others injured. The suspect, who was captured and has been arraigned, had streamed footage of his actions on Twitch. A spokesperson for the site told CNN Business that it removed the livestream "less than 2 minutes" after violence began and is monitoring for any reuploads of the stream.Moderation advocates are concerned, though, as reuploads are already proliferating other platforms including Facebook. Depending on how one construes exceptions to the law regarding "unlawful expression," Texas users may have right to sue if their reupload of the stream was taken down from social media. We've reached out to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for comment and will update this story if we hear back.