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On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to decide if two laws crafted by Republicans in Florida and Texas run afoul of the First Amendment because the laws force platforms to explain all their content moderation decisions to users.

Both laws, passed in 2021 after several major platforms banned Donald Trump, seemingly were a way for Republicans to fight back and prevent supposedly liberal-leaning platforms from allegedly censoring conservative viewpoints.

The laws are designed to stop the most popular platforms from inconsistently censoring content by requiring platforms to provide detailed explanations to users whenever their posts are removed or their accounts are banned or "shadowbanned" (deprioritized or restricted from feeds by platforms' algorithms). The Texas law also requires platforms to provide clear paths to timely appeal censored content, and both laws require platforms to publicly disclose standards for when and why they censor users.

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In July, a federal judge issued an order limiting the Biden administration's social media contacts over Republicans' concerns that officials illegally suppressed speech. That order was mostly overturned last week, and now, US Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar has rushed to ask the Supreme Court to reevaluate one of the order's remaining restrictions.

In a court filing yesterday, Prelogar requested that the Supreme Court extend the stay of a preliminary injunction banning officials from "coercing" or "significantly encouraging" social media content removals. The injunction would've taken effect Monday, but the Biden administration wants the stay extended while the Supreme Court reviews the lower court's decision. If the stay isn't extended, Prelogar argued that the allegedly overly broad injunction "would impose grave and irreparable harms on the government and the public" by preventing officials from quickly responding during emergencies and generally advocating and defending policies that advance the public interest.

The "sweeping preliminary injunction" governs "thousands of federal officials’ and employees’ speech concerning any content posted on any social-media platform by anyone," Prelogar said. "The implications of the Fifth Circuit’s holdings are startling. The court imposed unprecedented limits on the ability of the President’s closest aides to use the bully pulpit to address matters of public concern, on the FBI’s ability to address threats to the Nation’s security, and on the CDC’s ability to relay public health information at platforms’ request."

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The day before a Texas antiporn law that requires age verification to access adult websites was set to take effect, the state's attorney general, Angela Colmenero, has been at least temporarily blocked from enforcing the law.

US District Judge David Alan Ezra granted a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking enforcement after the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) joined adult performers and sites like Pornhub in a lawsuit opposing the law. Today, they succeeded in convincing Ezra that Texas' law violates the First Amendment and would have "a chilling effect on legally-protected speech," FSC said in a press release.

“This is a huge and important victory against the rising tide of censorship online,” Alison Boden, FSC's executive director, said. “From the beginning, we have argued that the Texas law, and those like it, are both dangerous and unconstitutional. We’re pleased that the court agreed with our view that [the law's] true purpose is not to protect young people, but to prevent Texans from enjoying First Amendment protected expression. The state’s defense of the law was not based in science or technology, but ideology and politics.”

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X, formerly known as Twitter, spent the summer hastily rebranding and vying to win advertisers back , but at least one advertiser was shocked when X swiftly rejected its ads after deciding to return to X.

A nonpartisan nonprofit, the Freedom Forum, told Ars that last week it discovered that its X ads were being arbitrarily blocked after attempting to advertise an educational, family-friendly festival that celebrates the First Amendment.

The group assumed the ads were blocked in error, so it reached out to X six different times, and at various times, X's rationale for blocking the ad changed.

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Debate continues to rage over the federal Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which seeks to hold platforms liable for feeding harmful content to minors. KOSA is lawmakers' answer to whistleblower Frances Haugen's shocking revelations to Congress. In 2021, Haugen leaked documents and provided testimony alleging that Facebook knew that its platform was addictive and was harming teens—but blinded by its pursuit of profits, it chose to ignore the harms.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who sponsored KOSA, was among the lawmakers stunned by Haugen's testimony. He said in 2021 that Haugen had showed that "Facebook exploited teens using powerful algorithms that amplified their insecurities." Haugen's testimony, Blumenthal claimed, provided "powerful proof that Facebook knew its products were harming teenagers."

But when Blumenthal introduced KOSA last year, the bill faced immediate and massive blowback from more than 90 organizations—including tech groups, digital rights advocates, legal experts, child safety organizations, and civil rights groups. These critics warned lawmakers of KOSA's many flaws, but they were most concerned that the bill imposed a vague "duty of care" on platforms that was "effectively an instruction to employ broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content." The fear was that the duty of care provision would likely lead platforms to over-moderate and imprecisely filter content deemed controversial—things like information on LGBTQ+ issues, drug addiction, eating disorders, mental health issues, or escape from abusive situations.

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A federal judge in New York today ordered disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried's to jail after revoking his bail, The New York Times reported .

Bankman-Fried had been under house arrest, but prosecutors convinced Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Federal District Court in Manhattan that Bankman-Fried had fed documents to the media in order to intimidate a witness in the case. Now Bankman-Fried has to prepare his defense to 13 criminal charges from jail.

In June, Bankman-Fried filed a motion to dismiss, hoping that some of those charges would be dropped. But Kaplan decided that his arguments in the motion were "either moot or without merit,” CNN reported .

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A federal judge yesterday ordered the Biden administration to halt a wide range of communications with social media companies, siding with Missouri and Louisiana in a lawsuit that alleges Biden and his administration violated the First Amendment by colluding with social networks "to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content."

The Biden administration argued that it communicated with tech companies to counter misinformation related to elections, COVID-19, and vaccines, and that it didn't exert illegal pressure on the companies. The communications to social media companies were not significant enough "to convert private conduct into government conduct," Department of Justice lawyers argued in the case.

But Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump nominee at US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, granted the plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction imposing limits on the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, the US Census Bureau, the State Department, the Homeland Security Department, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and many specific officials at those agencies. The injunction also affects White House officials.

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TikTok is funding the lawsuit filed by TikTok users to combat Montana's state-wide ban of the app, a New York Times report confirmed yesterday.

And not for the first time. Back in 2020, TikTok secretly supported TikTok users who sued over the federal TikTok ban introduced by President Donald Trump. A Wall Street Journal report noted that the 2020 lawsuit was a key part of TikTok's efforts to overturn Trump's ban.

Once again, TikTok sees its users as useful for challenging a ban. Legal experts told the Times that the new lawsuit takes the focus off TikTok's ties to China. Montana TikTokers have a personal First Amendment interest in the case, making it more about how a TikTok ban would harm Americans. Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, told the Times that he wouldn’t be surprised if the courts struck down Montana's ban.

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Yesterday, the US Supreme Court decided that a lower court's logic was flawed when it convicted a Colorado man, Billy Raymond Counterman, for stalking. Counterman had sent hundreds of online messages—some of which the lower court ruled that a reasonable person would consider threatening—to a local musician, Coles Whalen, whom he'd never met.

The Supreme Court ruled that the objective standard that the Colorado lower court used to convict Counterman violated his First Amendment rights and, if upheld, could have a chilling effect on online speech.

"The State prosecuted Counterman in accordance with an objective standard and did not have to show any awareness on Counterman’s part of his statements’ threatening character," the SCOTUS opinion said. "That is a violation of the First Amendment."