WASHINGTON—Today, NetChoice and our co-plaintiff CCIA filed a petition for certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court. We asked the Court to review the Fifth Circuit’s erroneous judgment in NetChoice & CCIA v. Paxton.
Our appeal comes after the Fifth Circuit issued a sweeping, unprecedented opinion gutting the First Amendment and upholding Texas’s law. The Fifth Circuit’s divided 2-1 ruling conflicts directly with the unanimous decision of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in NetChoice v. Moody, creating a stark circuit split.
In Moody, the Eleventh Circuit held that (1) websites, platforms, and apps have First Amendment rights; (2) those rights include the right to editorial discretion; (3) editorial discretion protects content moderation; (4) laws that infringe those rights are unconstitutional; and (5) websites like Facebook.com, YouTube.com, Etsy.com, and others are not common carriers.
If allowed to go into effect, HB 20 would infringe the First Amendment rights of American businesses to curate content as they see fit.
“We’re confident the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold the First Amendment by concluding that the government may not force private businesses to disseminate vile content or overrule their private editorial decisions,” said NetChoice Counsel Chris Marchese.
“No government should be in the business of controlling online communities or the speech they produce,” continued Marchese. “Yet that is exactly what Texas has tried to do with HB 20 and what the Supreme Court should reject.”
You can find our resources on NetChoice & CCIA v. Paxton here and our petition for certiorari from the U.S. Supreme Court here.
Please contact Krista Chavez at press@netchoice.org with inquiries.