The justices seemed convinced that Texas was infringing on tech companies’ First Amendment ‘right’ to exercise editorial judgment. //

That reflects another missed opportunity for Texas: Clement’s repeated argument that the Texas law would interfere with tech companies’ editorial function and therefore, by definition, chill speech. Tech companies often cite these editorial functions. But as I have written elsewhere in these pages, before 2014, tech companies did not engage in any such editorial decisions. They screened for obscene content but nothing else. And, until 2018, they did little substantive content moderation after the fact, focusing instead on removing violent content like videos of beheadings (which I think we all agree can and should be banned).

In fact, it is the tech companies, not states like Texas, that are chilling speech. We see that plainly in cases like the one I am litigating for presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Google has removed video of Kennedy’s political speeches from YouTube — including his pre-announcement speech at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire — because they contain “misinformation.” But what is “misinformation”? According to Google, it is speech that either Google or the federal government does not like. In other words, it is dissent. But, of course, America has a proud history of promoting dissent. Silencing dissent is inconsistent with American values. //

Clement may have focused on terrorists and sexual predators in his discussion of the “bad stuff” that tech companies want to block from their platforms. But that is not what drove Texas and Florida to pass their laws. Those laws were driven by the censoring of people like Kennedy, government dissidents whom the corporate media regularly ignore and who must use social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook to reach people.