Supreme Court grapples with online First Amendment rights as social media teems with misinformation

Kate Starbird, University of Washington professor and misinformation researcher, on 60 Minutes

CBS News / 60 Minutes
As big tech firms wrestle with how to keep false and harmful information off their social networks, the Supreme Court is wrestling with whether platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now called X, have the right to decide what users can say on their sites. 

The dispute centers on a pair of laws passed in the red states of Florida and Texas over the question of First Amendment rights on the internet. The Supreme Court is considering whether the platforms are like newspapers, which have free speech rights to make their own editorial decisions, or if they're more like telephone companies, that merely transmit everyone's speech.

If the laws are upheld, the platforms could be forced to carry hate speech, and false medical information, the very content most big tech companies have spent years trying to remove through teams of content moderators. But in the process, conservatives claim that the companies have engaged in a conspiracy to suppress their speech. MORE