FLORIDA, July 6, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — A federal judge has temporarily blocked Florida’s recently-enacted law limiting political discrimination on social media platforms, setting the stage for an expected legal battle.
In May, the Sunshine State’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law he had proposed that prohibits social media companies from intentionally deplatforming candidates for pending elections, forbids deplatforming journalistic outlets on the basis of content, recognizes free advertising on social media platforms as in-kind political contributions, mandates transparency for content restriction criteria and rule changes, and more. Under the law, wrongly-deplatformed Floridians could sue Facebook, Twitter, etc. for monetary damages.
In his preliminary injunction issued June 30, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle claimed the plaintiffs (trade groups representing various websites including Facebook and Twitter) “are likely to prevail on the merits of their claim that these statutes violate the First Amendment,” because the law “compels providers to host speech that violates their standards — speech they otherwise would not host — and forbids providers from speaking as they otherwise would.”
The judge singled out for criticism a controversial provision added by Republican state Sen. Ray Rodrigues, which exempts “any information service, system, Internet search engine, or access software provider operated by
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