In a past Trending Law Blog post on November 1, 2023, we discussed how the Supreme Court of the United States granted petitions for certiorari in Florida’s NetChoice LLC v. Moody case and Texas’ NetChoice LLC v. Paxton matter. In Moody, the Eleventh Circuit upheld an injunction of Florida’s law regulating large social media companies and other internet platforms; in Paxton, the Fifth Circuit reversed a preliminary injunction of a similar Texas statute. In granting the petitions for certiorari, the Supreme Court agreed to resolve the split between the two Courts of Appeal.

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Rob Nussbaum

Rob Nussbaum has lectured numerous times on legal issues and social media and how social media and other electronic evidence may be admitted into evidence at trial. He concentrates his practice in general commercial litigation and appears regularly in New Jersey federal and state courts.

For any questions relating to whether your website or social media presence can be used against you as a basis for personal jurisdiction, please contact Robert B. Nussbaum, Esq. at Saiber LLC.

saiber.com/attorney_profile.asp?id=37&/Robert_Nussbaum

On March 15, 2024, the Supreme Court of the United States issued decisions in Lindke v. Freed and Garnier v. O’Connor-Ratcliff, two cases which involved when public officials can block social media followers and delete their comments.

The Lindke v. Freed case involved a City Manager (Freed) who deleted certain Facebook comments and then blocked Lindke, a critic of the city, who made comments on Freed’s Facebook page. Freed operated the Facebook page himself and used it to post “prolifically (and primarily)” about his personal life despite sometimes making posts about his City Manager job. After Freed blocked him, Lindke sued, claiming Freed’s Facebook page was a public forum and, as such, Freed violated Lindke’s First Amendment rights by removing his comments and then blocking him.

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Rob Nussbaum

Rob Nussbaum has lectured numerous times on legal issues and social media and how social media and other electronic evidence may be admitted into evidence at trial. He concentrates his practice in general commercial litigation and appears regularly in New Jersey federal and state courts.

For any questions relating to whether your website or social media presence can be used against you as a basis for personal jurisdiction, please contact Robert B. Nussbaum, Esq. at Saiber LLC.

saiber.com/attorney_profile.asp?id=37&/Robert_Nussbaum

In past Trending Law Blog posts on August 13, 2021, November 17, 2021, December 16, 2021, and September 8, 2022, we discussed the two NetChoice cases that arose in Florida (NetChoice, LLC v. Moody) and Texas (NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton), which involved states’ efforts to control and/or regulate the online speech of social media platforms.

In Moody, the United State Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit held that social media companies are private actors whose rights are protected by the First Amendment, allowing the platforms to moderate the content and exercise editorial judgment regarding posts on their sites. By contrast, in Paxton, the Fifth Circuit held that a private corporation’s First Amendment rights did not allow it “to muzzle speech” of those who post on a social media platform.

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Rob Nussbaum

Rob Nussbaum has lectured numerous times on legal issues and social media and how social media and other electronic evidence may be admitted into evidence at trial. He concentrates his practice in general commercial litigation and appears regularly in New Jersey federal and state courts.

For any questions relating to whether your website or social media presence can be used against you as a basis for personal jurisdiction, please contact Robert B. Nussbaum, Esq. at Saiber LLC.

saiber.com/attorney_profile.asp?id=37&/Robert_Nussbaum

On May 5, 2022, plaintiffs – the States of Missouri and Louisiana as well as various private parties – filed suit against the President and various federal agencies and officials, alleging that popular social media platforms had either blocked plaintiffs’ use of the platforms or “downgraded” their posts regarding certain controversial issues. On July 4, 2022, the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction against various Executive Branch agencies and officials prohibiting them from coercing social media companies to engage in censorship or controlling those companies’ decisions about the content posted on their platforms.

The injunction was slightly modified on October 3, 2023 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit such that the injunction provided that certain federal officials (1) could not “coerce” social media platforms to make “content moderation decisions” and (2) not meaningfully control social media platforms’ “content-moderation efforts.”

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Rob Nussbaum

Rob Nussbaum has lectured numerous times on legal issues and social media and how social media and other electronic evidence may be admitted into evidence at trial. He concentrates his practice in general commercial litigation and appears regularly in New Jersey federal and state courts.

For any questions relating to whether your website or social media presence can be used against you as a basis for personal jurisdiction, please contact Robert B. Nussbaum, Esq. at Saiber LLC.

saiber.com/attorney_profile.asp?id=37&/Robert_Nussbaum

Just twelve days after Supreme Court of the United States issued a per curiam decision in Gonzalez v. Google LLC, in which the Court declined to address the application of §230 of the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S. §230(c)(1)  (“§230”) (discussed in the June 2, 2023 Trending Law Blog post) to social media platforms, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in the matter of Jane Does v. Reddit, Inc., a case decided on October 24, 2022 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In Reddit, parents and/or victims sued Reddit, a social media platform, after users of Reddit posted sexually explicit images and videos of minors on the site. The plaintiffs claimed Reddit was liable under the federal sex trafficking statute as a beneficiary of child pornography because Reddit financially benefitted from hosting the content. The district court dismissed the action and the Ninth Circuit affirmed, both courts finding that §230 protected Reddit from liability.

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Rob Nussbaum

Rob Nussbaum has lectured numerous times on legal issues and social media and how social media and other electronic evidence may be admitted into evidence at trial. He concentrates his practice in general commercial litigation and appears regularly in New Jersey federal and state courts.

For any questions relating to whether your website or social media presence can be used against you as a basis for personal jurisdiction, please contact Robert B. Nussbaum, Esq. at Saiber LLC.

saiber.com/attorney_profile.asp?id=37&/Robert_Nussbaum

The May 10, 2021 post The Donald Trump Twitter Case: Vacated and Dismissed as Moot by the Supreme Court reported how the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Knight First Amendment Inst. at Columbia University v. Trump, in which the Southern District and Second Circuit found that then-President Donald Trump’s decision to block certain social media users from accessing his Twitter account was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. In its one paragraph decision, the Supreme Court failed to address the appeal on its merits, instead dismissing the case as moot because Donald Trump was no longer President. The Supreme Court now has another opportunity to consider whether public officials violate the First Amendment by blocking certain members of the public from commenting on the officials’ publicly accessible social media pages thanks to the Ninth Circuit case of Garnier v. O’Connor-Ratcliff.

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Rob Nussbaum

Rob Nussbaum has lectured numerous times on legal issues and social media and how social media and other electronic evidence may be admitted into evidence at trial. He concentrates his practice in general commercial litigation and appears regularly in New Jersey federal and state courts.

For any questions relating to whether your website or social media presence can be used against you as a basis for personal jurisdiction, please contact Robert B. Nussbaum, Esq. at Saiber LLC.

saiber.com/attorney_profile.asp?id=37&/Robert_Nussbaum