A guest op-ed published in The New York Times on Tuesday, “The First Amendment is Out of Control,” was swiftly criticized on social media.
“The First Amendment was a way to help the vulnerable,” Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor and former special assistant to President Biden on the National Economic Council, wrote.
The guest essay focused on the Supreme Court’s decision to remand to lower courts challenges to Florida and Texas laws that limit how large social media companies can moderate user content. Conservatives and others on social media questioned the headline and mocked the article.
“The judiciary needs to recognize that the First Amendment is out of control. It has begun to threaten many of the nation’s most important missions, including national security and protecting the safety and privacy of its citizens,” Wu wrote. “Somewhere this century, the judiciary lost its way. Justices have turned a constitutional provision meant to protect unpopular opinions into a catch-all tool for striking down legislation that now primarily protects corporate interests. Nearly any law that touches the movement of information can be attacked in the name of the First Amendment.”
On Tuesday, July 2, 2024, the headline of a New York Times opinion piece about the First Amendment drew swift criticism on social media. (Gary Hirschhorn/Getty Images/Screenshot/The New York Times)
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“The New York Times would not want to repeal or abridge the First Amendment unless it would give them special privileges that others do not have,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, wrote on X.
“The New York Times is attacking your free speech,” billionaire Elon Musk wrote.
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The president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) responded to parts of Wu’s article:
“The fear of government power affecting the free flow of information was a big part of the reason for the ‘Congress shall make no law’ provision. In fact, it’s a big part of why the Founders included ‘the press’ in Article 1A — they didn’t mean organized journalism, they meant the printing press, which was literally the largest technology for transmitting information at the time,” Greg Lukianoff said.
Laws in Texas and Florida require big tech companies like Twitter and Facebook to host third-party communications but prohibit them from blocking or removing users’ posts based on their political views.
In a unanimous decision Monday, the Supreme Court said the lower courts did not properly analyze the First Amendment issues at issue in the case, leaving each to appeal again to their respective Circuit Courts of Appeals.
“Today, we reverse both decisions for reasons unrelated to First Amendment principles, because neither court of appeals adequately considered the ostensible nature of NetChoice’s challenges. They addressed the issues the parties focused on primarily, and the parties argued the cases primarily as if the law applied only to the curated feeds offered by the largest and most representative social media platforms, as if each case was an applicable challenge brought by Facebook protesting its loss of control over the content of its News Feed,” the court wrote.
“Of all institutions, shouldn’t the @nytimes be the one to support the First Amendment more than anyone else?” wrote the Republican account for the House Judiciary Committee of X.
Conservative commentator Ian Miles Chung wrote that Wu was vocal about the quiet party.
“They want censorship. A lot,” he said.
Phil Karpin, chairman of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, also said Wu’s headline “says the quiet parts out loud.”
Wu argued that the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Texas and Florida cases brought by NetChoice “pose new threats to core states’ functions.”
“By presuming free speech protections apply to tech companies’ ‘curation’ of content even when no human judgment is involved, the Supreme Court is weakening the government’s power to regulate so-called public transportation such as trains and airlines, a traditional state function dating back to the Middle Ages,” Wu wrote in the op-ed.
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Fox News’ Brianna Herlihy and Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.
