(Bloomberg) — A federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked parts of a new state law that would ban social-media companies from suspending users over political posts, handing a crucial early victory to trade groups representing Twitter Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman in Austin on Wednesday granted a request for a preliminary injunction, prohibiting enforcement of the law that was set to take effect Thursday. The ruling blocks the law while the litigation challenging it proceeds.
The trade groups claim the law would force Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to host extremist content in violation of their user policies, while Texas Governor Greg Abbott and other Republicans argue the ban is needed to protect conservative viewpoints from being silenced.
The suit was filed by NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which represent many of the biggest technology companies.
“Texas’ law would have forced online platforms to pull the referees from social media sites, giving anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, and insurrectionists free reign,” said Adam Kovacevich, head of left-leaning tech group Chamber of Progress, which filed a brief in the case supporting the plaintiffs.
The judge said an injunction is warranted because the trade groups are likely to succeed on their claim that social media platforms have a First Amendment right to moderate content. Pitman rejected the state’s argument that platforms don’t get such protections because they’re not newspapers and that artificial intelligence is sometimes used to make moderating decisions.
The judge, a Barack Obama appointee, said he acknowledges that the editorial discretion at social media platform doesn’t “fit neatly with our 20th Century vision of a newspaper editor hand-selecting an article to publish.
“It is indeed new, and exciting — or frightening, depending on who you ask — that algorithms do some of the work that a newspaper publisher previously did, but the core question is still whether a private company exercises editorial discretion over the dissemination of content, not the exact process used,” Pitman wrote.
The judge also denied Texas’s request to dismiss the lawsuit.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton didn’t return a message seeking comment.
Abbott criticized social-media companies for banning former President Donald Trump from their platforms after a mob of his supporters raided the Capitol on Jan. 6. A similar law in Florida targeting social-media companies was put on hold earlier by a judge in a suit brought by the same trade groups.
One of the sponsors of the Texas bill, Republican state representative Briscoe Cain, was once suspended temporarily by Twitter for posting “My AR is ready for you” at Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke, in a spat over gun control.
The case is Netchoice LLC v. Paxton, 1:21-cv-00840, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas (Austin).
(Updates with comment from tech group)
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