While the ruling itself doesn’t directly apply to social media, the Supreme Court actually reversed the 2nd Circuit ruling that declared MNN a public forum, and very strongly hinted that it’s ridiculous to think social media platforms could be considered public forums. Instead, the ruling, which came out earlier this week, went in the opposite direction. I also thought that the Supreme Court would likely rule narrowly and avoid the issue of social media platforms altogether - though, given the political climate, I feared that the Supreme Court would say something stupid on this and create a new mess. The 2nd Circuit agreed that it was a public forum and MNN appealed to the Supreme Court, raising the specter that if the ruling were allowed to stand, it could end up being applied to the various social media platforms as well, creating quite a mess.Īs I wrote in my post about it, this seemed like a stretch as well, since the state’s role in creating MNN was a key factor here, and that was not at all true with social media platforms. Thus, there was a strong argument that MNN was a public forum, given the state’s role in creating it. The two fired producers, DeeDee Halleck and Jesus Melendez, argued that this violated the 1st Amendment, because MNN was set up by New York City’s government, as required by New York State. The details of the case are a bit involved - and you can read the original post for more details - but the short version is that two producers were fired from a public access channel, Manhattan Neighborhood Network, for criticizing MNN. This has never made much sense, and required a pretty twisted reading of those other cases - but there was some thought that this new case might allow the Supreme Court to weigh in on the subject. A key argument brought forth by many who have been kicked off of various social media platforms is that under a strained reading of both the Pruneyard case (a very narrowly ruled case, establishing malls as public forums) and the Packingham case (which said states cannot create laws that ban people from the internet), is that social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are some sort of quasi-public forums, and therefore the 1st Amendment applies to them as state actors… and therefore they can’t ban anyone or block content.
Last fall I wrote about the Supreme Court agreeing to hear a case that some argued would allow the Supreme Court to declare that social media sites were public forums thereby limiting their ability to block or ban certain users.
Tue, Jun 18th 2019 10:42am - Mike Masnick
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