Supreme Court Should Protect Social-Media Free Speech

The social-media age promised a new, more democratic marketplace of ideas, in which an ordinary citizen without a printing press or a TV station could be heard by a mass audience. Private companies would publish the speech of all comers. Today, social-media companies play an important role in facilitating public discourse, especially on matters of politics. Americans have come to depend on them as if they were public fora.

Yet the leading social-media giants have earned the public’s mistrust through politically biased and often arbitrary and inconsistent use of their power to censor or promote content on their platforms. They banned the president of the United States and, more scandalously, suppressed the New York Post’s legitimate and accurate news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the heat of the 2020 presidential campaign. Ordinary citizens have felt the brunt of these content-moderation follies with fewer avenues of recourse than the Post or Donald Trump.

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The social-media age promised a new, more democratic marketplace of ideas, in which an ordinary citizen without a printing press or a TV station could be heard by a mass audience. Private companies would publish the speech of all comers. Today, social-media companies play an important role in facilitating public discourse, especially on matters of politics. Americans have come to depend on them as if they were public fora.

Yet the leading social-media giants have earned the public’s mistrust through politically biased and often arbitrary and inconsistent use of their power to censor or promote content on their platforms. They banned the president of the United States and, more scandalously, suppressed the New York Post’s legitimate and accurate news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the heat of the 2020 presidential campaign. Ordinary citizens have felt the brunt of these content-moderation follies with fewer avenues of recourse than the Post or Donald Trump.