We filed an Amicus

Some of you have probably followed the Netchoice case challenging Texas and Florida's social media laws. For those of you that have not—Texas and Florida passed laws that prohibit platforms from taking down speech they find repugnant. This should have been an easy case to bat down but the 5th Cir., in our view, completely screwed up and found that Texas's law was constitutional.

The way platforms are defined under the Texas law is incredibly broad to the point that it could give rise to moderator liability on reddit. And even if it doesn't, if the law is upheld it's an easy step for states like Texas and Florida to just pass another law to go after hobbyists running message boards they don't like.

These laws are about hijacking eyeballs and audiences. The laws aren't really about protecting speech so much as they are about compelling state sanctioned speech through forced publication.

Fortunately, the First Amendment protects a platform's right to ban nazis, as surely as it protects the Cattlemen’s Association’s right not to give PETA access to its mailing list.

So, the moderators through counsel filed an Amicus. We didn't want to duplicate arguments already made by Netchoice or others including Reddit which submitted an Amicus with other companies where Reddit pointed out that the private right of action in the Texas law already resulted in them getting sued by a user who got banned from /r/startek for calling Wesley Crusher a "soy boy." (which...lmao.) So we focused on some of the speech we remove here, and would like to keep removing, because if we didn't this place would absolutely fucking melt. It includes death threats to the justices themselves, their home addresses, the identities of their clerks, racist content, sexist content, off topic ramblings, QANON and sovereign citizen nonsense... you get it. You've probably seen it sometimes before we've had a chance to clean house.

We sincerely hope SCOTUS considers our points because even a place like /r/law that allows a screenshot of a joke tweet about a divorce and a parrot needs at least some moderation. For an Amicus it's pretty short and hopefully fun to read.

Special thanks to Gabriel Latner of Advocan Law. We were initially a bit skeptical of whether there would be much value to contributing our own brief, but through the process of it, we felt we could provide a window into on-the-ground effects this might actually have on the spaces we maintain, in a way other briefs might not. Gabe was a pleasure to work with.

Also thank you to Jack at Legal Printers, LLC. They really helped us out with SCOTUS formatting and getting it submitted on time.