How Samuel Alito got canceled from the Supreme Court social media majority

CNN — The hardline approach Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito takes usually gets him what he wants. US appellate Judge Andrew Oldham, a former Alito clerk, belittled the “large, well-heeled corporations that have hired an armada of attorneys from some of the best law firms in the world to protect their censorship rights.” The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, however, ruling on the Florida law, took the opposite tack and declared that content moderation implicated the First Amendment and protections for “editorial discretion.” Writing that decision, US appellate Judge Kevin Newsom said, “‘content-moderation’ decisions constitute protected exercises of editorial judgment.” Video Ad Feedback Alito slams media criticism of Supreme Court in secretly recorded audio 01:53 - Source: CNN When the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the paired appeals on February 26, the justices struggled with multiple threshold issues, including how the laws might apply to typical social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, as well as to sites and apps like Etsy and Uber. Kagan wrote that the court was not dealing “with feeds whose algorithms respond solely to how users act online – giving them the content they appear to want, without any regard to independent content standards.” Video Ad Feedback How Amy Coney Barrett broke away from Chief Justice Roberts on Trump immunity ruling 04:58 - Source: CNN Jackson then joined much of Kagan’s analysis as well, including that a private company’s collection of third-party content for its platform could itself be expressive and therefore subject to First Amendment considerations when a state attempts to regulate. He expressed sympathy for state efforts to restrict what, in an earlier phase of the Texas case Alito called “the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.” In his separate July 1 opinion for a minority, Alito pointed up why states might want to regulate how platforms filter content: “Deleting the account of an elected official or candidate for public office may seriously impair that individual’s efforts to reach constituents or voters, as well as the ability of voters to make a fully informed electoral choice. Rejecting the 5th Circuit’s reasoning, the Supreme Court said the 5th Circuit had applied an “overly cramped view” of the court’s precedent for when people may sue for First Amendment retaliation claims.