Free Speech on Trial | The Free Press

Jay said that after a day of legal argument he left feeling deflated. His lawyer, Jenin Younes, wasn t so gloomy. It went about as I predicted it would, she said, sketching out what she saw to be the dynamics on the bench, with three sympathetic justices (Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas), three swing votes (Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice John Roberts), and three skeptics (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Brown Jackson). 

The court will hand down its decision by June and so Jay and his legal team have plenty of time to read the tea leaves. 

Meanwhile, Murthy v. Missouri is only one in a series of First Amendment cases being heard by the Supreme Court this session. The others are: 

• The Netchoice cases, which deal with laws in Texas and Florida that limit the freedom of social media companies to moderate content on their platforms. The cases pit the free speech rights of those companies against the rights of their users. 

• A case concerning whether a New York official violated the National Rifle Association s First Amendment rights when, after the 2018 Parkland shooting, she urged banks and insurance companies to stop working with the group. 

• A case looking at whether public officials can block you on social media. (This week, the court has already decided, unanimously, that they cannot.)

All these cases apply the First Amendment to the social media age, but the first two are most important. With Netchoice, the court will decide whether social media companies should be treated as publishers or as a modern-day public utility. And with Jay s case, the court will decide whether the powers of the counter-disinformation complex through which so much modern censorship occurs are legitimate, or if those powers need to be checked.

via www.thefp.com

Heck of a time to be rewriting the Constitution.