United States of America: Confirmed blocking of Senate Bill 7072 provisions prohibiting social media platforms from blocking politicians

On 23 May 2022, the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit confirmed the blocking of certain provisions in Senate Bill 7072 due to their unconstitutionality. The ruling followed a ruling by the Court for the Northern District of Florida which blocked the Bill on 30 June 2021. The Court of Appeals ruled that moderation practices from social media platforms are an exercise of editorial judgment and thus are protected by the US First Amendment. Therefore, the Senate Bill 7072 prohibition of deplatforming practices is unconstitutional and its blocking is confirmed. Moreover, the ruling considers the law's requirement that platforms provide notice and a detailed justification for every action of content moderation as unconstitutional because it is "unduly burdensome" and likely to discourage platforms’ protected speech. As regards these provisions, the Court confirmed the preliminary injunction emitted by the District Court for the Northern District of Florida. On the other hand, the judges ruled that the right of deplatformed users to access and retrieve all of their information and content on the platform within 60 days of the deplatforming is constitutional, as are certain transparency requirements for platforms. The Bill would prohibit social media platforms from deplatforming political candidates and would introduce fines for deplatforming depending on the candidate's status. The fine for deplatforming a candidate for statewide office was set at USD 250’000 per day and for candidates for non-statewide offices USD 25’000 per day. In addition, the Bill aims to prohibit restrictions on journalistic enterprises with more than 100’000 active users per month or 50’000 paid subscribers and included provisions against shadow-banning, defined as any action taken to limit the exposure of a user or its content to other users of the social media platform.