Justice Elena Kagan grilled Florida solicitor Henry Whitaker over laws that would prevent social media companies from taking down objectionable content.
Florida and Texas have passed laws that limit what content social media companies can remove from their sites.
"I mean, we point out in our brief that when we think that if you had a, an internet platform that indeed had a platform driven message, was selective on the front end, democrats.com, I think that would be a very different kind of analysis compared to a company like Facebook or YouTube, who is in the business of just basically trying to get as many eyeballs on their site as possible," Whitaker said in defense of the laws during Supreme Court oral arguments on Monday.
"But why is it different?" Kagan asked. "Facebook, YouTube, these are the paradigmatic social media companies that this law applies to and they have rules about content."
"They say, you know, you can't have hate speech on the site," she continued. "They say you can't have misinformation with respect to particular subject matter areas and they seem to take those rules, I mean, you know, somebody can say maybe they should enforce them even more than they do, but they do seem to take them seriously. They have thousands and thousands of employees who are devoted to enforcing those rules."
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Whitaker noted that 99% of posted content was not censored on major social media sites.
"But that 1% seems to have gotten some people extremely angry," Kagan noted. "You know, the 1% that's like, we don't want anti-vaxxers on our site, or we don't want insurrectionists on our site."
"I mean, that's what motivated these laws, isn't it?" she added. "And that's what's getting people upset about them, is that other people have different views about what it means to provide misinformation as to voting and things like that. And, you know, that's the point."
