Even though it might not be constantly apparent, the truth is our lives are governed by different facets at every point. These facets are highly influenced by our motivations, as well as the state of our surroundings. Now, even though such sources function around a shared purpose of providing benefit to the concerned individual, they have clashed on numerous occasions. You see, as important as they are, the external factors don’t always have our best interests at heart, and that can, at times, lead to certain undesirable consequences. The severity of said consequences, in turn, comes with heavy variance; hence to curb any potential negative ramifications in play, we closely regulate events taking place across the external sphere. It must be noted that our regulation efforts are consistently tailored as per the needs of a particular area. This is, of course, the case due to general contrast within the world’s spectrum, and our compliment to it has become more significant ever since technology turned up on the block. Today, regulatory industry is increasingly wary about how to do the needful without being overly restrictive and triggering disruptions in the world’s pursuit to achieve technological brilliance. Nevertheless, they are also closely tailing the companies that are seemingly using technology in an unethical manner. Over the recent past, we have received enough evidence regarding regulators’ seriousness about such an issue, but their latest bid for a similar cause has landed sensationally in the vain.
Federal District Court of Austin has officially blocked the much-talked about Texas law, which was conceived to limit large social media platform’s ability around content moderation. The decision was taken to avoid the violation of First Amendment Act, a card these social media platforms played right away after the HB 20 law caught some momentum. For now, as a result of the proposed injunction getting approved, HB 20 law will remain on hold until all the relevant investigations are completed.
The Texas social media law actually became a thing on the back of many accusations posed by conservation politicians, who claimed that platforms like Facebook and Twitter had a liberal-friendly moderation policy in place. If we are talking about the parameters of the law, it looks to prohibit any platform with 50,000 monthly active uses from delivering an immediate response to content that goes against the community guidelines.
“Private companies that use editorial judgment to choose whether to publish content — and, if they do publish content, use editorial judgment to choose what they want to publish — cannot be compelled by the government to publish other content,” the court order read.
