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First Amendment Battles Over-Anti-Deplatforming Statutes: Examining Miami Herald Publishing Co. V. Tornillo's Relevance For Today's Online Social Media Platform Cases, Clay Calvert
UF Law Faculty Publications
Florida adopted a statute in 2021 barring large social media sites from deplatforming-removing from their sites-candidates running for state and local office. Soon thereafter, Texas adopted its own anti-deplatforming statute. A trade association representing several major social media companies is now challenging the laws in federal court for violating the platforms' First Amendment speech rights. A central issue in both NetChoice, LLC v. Moody (targeting Florida's statute) and NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton (attacking Texas's law) is the significance of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1974 decision in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo. In Tornillo, the Court struck down …
#I🔫U: Considering The Context Of Online Threats, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky, Linda Riedemann Norbutt
#I🔫U: Considering The Context Of Online Threats, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky, Linda Riedemann Norbutt
UF Law Faculty Publications
The United States Supreme Court has failed to grapple with the unique interpretive difficulties presented by social media threats cases. Social media make hateful and threatening speech more common but also magnify the potential for a speaker's innocent words to be misunderstood People speak differently on different social media platforms, and architectural features of platforms, such as character limits, affect the meaning of speech. The same is true of other contextual clues unique to social media, such as gifs, hashtags, and emojis. Only by understanding social media contexts can legal decision-makers avoid overcriminalization of speech protected by the First Amendment. …
Symposium: Truth, Trust And The First Amendment In The Digital Age: Foreword: Whither The Fourth Estate?, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky
Symposium: Truth, Trust And The First Amendment In The Digital Age: Foreword: Whither The Fourth Estate?, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky
UF Law Faculty Publications
As a professor of Media Law, I have devoted my career over the past quarter of a century to the idea that the press plays a special role in our democracy. That role is largely encapsulated by the concept of the press as Fourth Estate – an unofficial branch of government in our scheme of separation of powers that checks the power of the three official branches. In our constitutional scheme, the press is the watchdog that informs us what the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government are up to and continually replenishes the stock of news – real …
Public Forum 2.1: Public Higher Education Institutions And Social Media, Robert H. Jerry Ii, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky
Public Forum 2.1: Public Higher Education Institutions And Social Media, Robert H. Jerry Ii, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky
UF Law Faculty Publications
Like most of us, public colleges and universities increasingly are communicating via Facebook, Second Life, YouTube, Twitter and other social media. Unlike most of us, public colleges and universities are government actors, and their social media communications present complex administrative and First Amendment challenges. The authors of this article — one the dean of a major public university law school responsible for directing its social media strategies, the other a scholar of social media and the First Amendment — have combined their expertise to help public university officials address these challenges. To that end, this article first examines current and …