USCA11 Case: 21-12355
4
Date Filed: 05/23/2022
Opinion of the Court
Page: 4 of 67
21-12355
We hold that it is substantially likely that social-media companies—even the biggest ones—are “private actors” whose rights
the First Amendment protects, Manhattan Cmty., 139 S. Ct. at
1926, that their so-called “content-moderation” decisions constitute protected exercises of editorial judgment, and that the provisions of the new Florida law that restrict large platforms’ ability to
engage in content moderation unconstitutionally burden that prerogative. We further conclude that it is substantially likely that one
of the law’s particularly onerous disclosure provisions—which
would require covered platforms to provide a “thorough rationale”
for each and every content-moderation decision they make—violates the First Amendment. Accordingly, we hold that the companies are entitled to a preliminary injunction prohibiting enforcement of those provisions. Because we think it unlikely that the
law’s remaining (and far less burdensome) disclosure provisions violate the First Amendment, we hold that the companies are not
entitled to preliminary injunctive relief with respect to them.
I
A
We begin with a primer: This is a case about social-media
platforms. (If you’re one of the millions of Americans who regularly use social media or can’t remember a time before social media
existed, feel free to skip ahead.)
At their core, social-media platforms collect speech created
by third parties—typically in the form of written text, photos, and