Victory! Federal Court Halts Florida’s Censorious Social Media Law Privileging Politicians’ Speech Over Everyday Users

A federal court on Thursday night blocked Florida’s effort to force internet platforms to host political candidates and media entities online speech, ruling that the law violated the First Amendment and a key federal law that protects users’ speech. We had expected the court to do so.

The Florida law, S.B. 7072, prohibited large online intermediaries—save for those that also happened to own a theme park in the state—from terminating politicians’ accounts or taking steps to de-prioritize their posts, regardless of whether it would have otherwise violated the sites’ own content policies. The law also prevented services from moderating posts by anyone who qualified as “journalistic enterprise” under the statute, which was so broadly defined as to include popular YouTube and Twitch streamers.

EFF and Protect Democracy filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, NetChoice v. Moody, arguing that although online services frequently make mistakes in moderating users’ content, disproportionately harming marginalized voices, the Florida statute violated the First Amendment rights of platforms and other internet users. Our brief pointed out that the law would only have “exacerbate[ed] existing power disparities between certain speakers and average internet users, while also creating speaker-based distinctions that are anathema to the First Amendment.”

In granting a preliminary injunction barring Florida officials from enforcing the law, the court agreed with several arguments EFF made in its brief. As EFF argued, the “law itself is internally inconsistent in that it requires ‘consistent’ treatment of all users, yet by its own terms sets out two categories of users for inconsistent special treatment.”

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