TALLAHASSEE, May 5, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — With an impending signature from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida is on the verge of enacting a first-of-its-kind law placing strong limits on social media giants’ ability to discriminate against conservative speech online.
The legislation, which has cleared both chambers of the state legislature, does the following:
forbids social media platforms from intentionally deplatforming any candidate for a pending election (enforceable by fines of $250,000 per day for statewide offices and $25,000 per day for other offices), though candidates may still be suspended for fourteen days or fewer; recognizes free advertising provided by a platform to any candidate (which does not include ordinary user posts by a candidate) as in-kind political contributions; requires platforms to apply its “censorship, deplatforming, and shadow banning standards in a consistent manner” based on publicly available standards; requires platforms to inform users of rule changes before enforcing them and forbids rules from being changed more than once every 30 days; requires platforms to inform users if they have been shadow-banned and entitles users to request data on how many people saw their posts; requires platforms to let users opt out of algorithms that arrange content visibility by criteria
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