Cite as: 603 U. S. ____ (2024)
5
ALITO, J., concurring in judgment
Content-moderation provisions. “Content moderation” is
the gentle-sounding term used by internet platforms to denote actions they take purportedly to ensure that userprovided content complies with their terms of service and
“community standards.” The Florida law eschews this neologism and instead uses the old-fashioned term “censorship.” To prevent platforms from discriminating against
certain views or speakers, that law requires each regulated
platform to enforce its “censorship . . . standards in a consistent manner among its users on the platform.” Fla. Stat.
§501.2041(2)(b). The law defines “censorship” as any action
taken to: “delete, regulate, restrict, edit, alter, [or] inhibit”
users from posting their own content; “post an addendum
to any content or material posted by a user”; or “inhibit the
ability of a user to be viewable by or to interact with another
user.” §501.2041(1)(b).
To prevent platforms from attempting to evade this restriction by regularly modifying their practices, the law prohibits platforms from changing their censorship “rules,
terms, and agreements . . . more than once every 30 days.”
§501.2041(2)(c). And to give Floridians more control over
how they view content on social-media websites, the law requires each platform to give its users the ability to “opt out”
of its content-sorting “algorithms” and instead view posts
sequentially or chronologically. §501.2041(2)(f ).6
Although some platforms still have employees who monitor and organize social-media feeds, for most platforms,
“the incredible volume of content shared each day makes
human review of each new post impossible.” Brief for Developers Alliance et al. as Amici Curiae 4. Consequently,
platforms rely heavily on algorithms to organize and censor
content. Ibid. And it is likely that they will increasingly
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6 As relevant here, an “algorithm” is a program that platforms use to
automatically “censor” or “moderate” content that violates their terms or
conditions, to organize the results of a search query, or to display posts
in a feed.