USCA11 Case: 21-12355
21-12355
Date Filed: 05/23/2022
Opinion of the Court
Page: 5 of 67
5
videos, which we’ll collectively call “posts”—and then make that
speech available to others, who might be either individuals who
have chosen to “follow” the “post”-er or members of the general
public. Social-media platforms include both massive websites with
billions of users—like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok—
and niche sites that cater to smaller audiences based on specific interests or affiliations—like Roblox (a child-oriented gaming network), ProAmericaOnly (a network for conservatives), and Vegan
Forum (self-explanatory).
Three important points about social-media platforms:
First—and this would be too obvious to mention if it weren’t so
often lost or obscured in political rhetoric—platforms are private
enterprises, not governmental (or even quasi-governmental) entities. No one has an obligation to contribute to or consume the
content that the platforms make available. And correlatively, while
the Constitution protects citizens from governmental efforts to restrict their access to social media, see Packingham v. North Carolina, 137 S. Ct. 1730, 1737 (2017), no one has a vested right to force
a platform to allow her to contribute to or consume social-media
content.
Second, a social-media platform is different from traditional
media outlets in that it doesn’t create most of the original content
on its site; the vast majority of “tweets” on Twitter and videos on
YouTube, for instance, are created by individual users, not the
companies that own and operate Twitter and YouTube. Even so,
platforms do engage in some speech of their own: A platform, for