On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued a ruling preventing Florida’s anti-content moderation law from going into effect. The court cited an amicus brief submitted by Chamber of Progress and nine other industry and civil society organizations, pointing to the brief’s analysis in its explanation of why the Florida law was not “narrowly tailored.” Read Chamber of Progress’s full amicus brief.

Florida’s law would have obligated online platforms to carry hate speech, disinformation, and other harmful content. Today’s ruling comes in conflict with a decision last week by the Fifth Circuit, which allowed a similar law in Texas to take effect.

The brief argues that Florida’s law endangers online consumers by stopping online platforms from protecting against harmful content:

For example, the Act would require child-friendly online services, such as Roblox or YouTube Kids, to treat certain pornographic sites as “journalistic enterprises” subject to only limited moderation. This is because the Act defines “journalistic enterprise” according to the amount of content a site publishes and the number of users it has, not by any activity associated with journalism. The pornography site PornHub appears to meet the criteria for a “journalistic enterprise,” and would likely be protected from content moderation under the Act.

In the opinion it issued Monday, the 11th Circuit Court referenced the example:

The journalistic-enterprises provision requires platforms to allow any entity with enough content and a sufficient number of users to post anything it wants—other than true “obscen[ity]”— and even prohibits platforms from adding disclaimers or warnings. See Fla. Stat. § 501.2041(2)(j). As one amicus vividly described the problem, the provision is so broad that it would prohibit a child friendly platform like YouTube Kids from removing—or even adding an age gate to—soft-core pornography posted by PornHub, which qualifies as a “journalistic enterprise” because it posts more than 100 hours of video and has more than 100 million viewers per year. See Chamber of Progress Amicus Br. at 12. That seems to us the opposite of narrow tailoring.

Last week, Chamber of Progress led a group of 20 organizations in an amicus brief for the Supreme Court opposing Texas’s anti-content moderation law. That law, which recently took effect following the Fifth Circuit decision, is headed to the Supreme Court after an emergency appeal by plaintiffs in the case. A full list of amicus brief cosigners in the Texas case is available here.

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Chamber of Progress (progresschamber.org) is a center-left tech industry policy coalition promoting technology’s progressive future.  We work to ensure that all Americans benefit from technological leaps, and that the tech industry operates responsibly and fairly.  

Our corporate partners do not have a vote on or veto over our positions. We do not speak for individual partner companies and remain true to our stated principles even when our partners disagree.