It’s Time to Put Conservative Censorship Allegations to Bed 

COMMENTARY

This summer, the Supreme Court issued a pair of opinions reinforcing online platforms’ right to create and enforce their own content moderation policies. Even though some members of Congress might like to believe otherwise, the court has now affirmed that content moderation on social media is protected by the First Amendment. 

After nearly a decade of campaigning against and passing laws to ban perceived social media “censorship,” it’s finally time for legislators to end their attacks on content moderation. 

Long before this year’s Supreme Court rulings, conservative members of Congress decried so-called censorship of right-wing voices in order to fundraise. 

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., once described Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as having “all the time and attention in the world to censor conservatives.” 

Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., decried the “Censorship Industrial Complex” on X. 

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, convened a Judiciary Committee hearing in 2019 to warn of a “consistent pattern of political bias” on social media. 

The official House Judiciary GOP account has tweeted more than a dozen times about infringed speech on social media.

All of these accusations ignore the fact that, by all measures, conservatives are doing just fine on social media. One study finds that conservative publishers and commentators receive more than 2.5 times the engagement on Facebook than liberal voices. 

This Republican drumbeat against content moderation is also what laid the groundwork for the Supreme Court cases that finally put the legal debate over this issue to rest: Murthy v. Missouri, NetChoice v. Paxton,and Moody v. NetChoice. Murthy focused on perceived censorship while the NetChoice cases addressed unconstitutional laws limiting how social media platforms can moderate content.

In Murthy, the court rejected the claim that the Biden administration’s calls for social media companies to take down pandemic misinformation violated the First Amendment. Why? Because the court found that social media companies made their own content moderation decisions based on long-standing user policies, an exercise of their First Amendment rights. 

A week later, the Supreme Court issued its joint ruling on NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice. The decision remanded laws in Florida and Texas restricting the right of online platforms to moderate content. The opinion again highlighted the First Amendment right of online platforms to moderate the content they host, leaving the Florida and Texas laws unlikely to survive First Amendment scrutiny. 

The two rulings show that the court understands how content moderation on social media works. Platforms can write their own policies, and no one — not the White House or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — can pressure them to keep content up or to take it down based on political whims. 

For free speech advocates, this should be a big win. 

The rulings also expose the idea of conservative censorship for what it is: a bad-faith ploy to “work the refs.” Writing for the majority in Murthy, Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that the plaintiffs’ vague allegations of censorship failed to prove that the government did anything to harm them in the first place. Still, some members of Congress are clinging to nebulous claims of victimhood at the hands of social media companies.

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who originally filed Murthy as Missouri’s attorney general, issued a statement following the Murthy ruling and accused the Biden administration of maintaining a “vast censorship enterprise.” Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa., appeared on Newsmax, claiming “the Biden administration’s censorship of conservatives on social media is undeniable and un-American.” And Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., spared no time before reintroducing a bill to eliminate what he calls “government-by-proxy censorship.” And just last month, right-wing operators published a blueprint for the next Republican administration — which invokes “Big Tech censorship” more than 20 times.

This isn’t the first time lawmakers have hurled disproven censorship accusations at social media platforms past their expiration date. In 2022, Republicans spun a study on Gmail spam filters, claiming that Google was intentionally relegating RNC fundraising emails to users’ junk folders. The study’s author responded that the censorship claims mischaracterized his paper, but Republicans pressed their claim with the Federal Election Commission anyway, only for it to be promptly dismissed.

This time is different. The highest court in the country has now ruled twice for content moderation in definitive 6-3 majorities, all with a conservative majority of justices. Short of a constitutional amendment, there is little Republican lawmakers can do to ban social media platforms from creating an online environment where their users want to spend time.

Nor should they. There are many tech issues that are ripe for lawmaking with a strong constitutional basis for congressional action, including federal privacy protection and investments in AI innovation. 

But Republicans’ political hobby horse of social media censorship should now be pronounced dead.

Adam Kovacevich is founder and CEO of the center-left tech industry coalition Chamber of Progress. He has worked at the intersection of tech and politics for 20 years, leading public policy at Google and Lime and serving as a Democratic Capitol Hill aide. He can be reached on X.