The US Supreme Court on Monday vacated and remanded lower court rulings regarding the constitutionality of statutes enacted by Florida and Texas to regulate large social media companies’ content moderation practices.

Both Florida and Texas passed laws in 2021 aimed at combatting what they saw as the stifling of conservative voices on major social media platforms. Earlier that year, Twitter (now X), announced a permanent suspension of the account of Donald Trump, citing a risk of the “further incitement of violence” following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The laws differ in scope and reach, but both aim to limit the rights of social media companies to filter, prioritize, and label user-generated content.

After the laws were passed, trade associations representing major social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube challenged them in court, arguing they violated the First Amendment right to free speech.

District courts in both states issued preliminary injunctions against the laws, but on appeal, the circuit courts were split. The Eleventh Circuit upheld the Florida injunction, citing First Amendment protections of editorial discretion. The Fifth Circuit reversed the Texas injunction, ruling that content moderation activities do not constitute “speech,” as defined in the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to rule on the First Amendment merits based on its conclusion that both circuits erred in their assessments.

Key to the court’s ruling in Moody v. NetChoice is the distinction between facial and as-applied challenges under US constitutional law. A facial challenge is a claim that a law is unconstitutional under all circumstances, i.e., “on its face.” An as-applied challenge is a claim that certain applications of a law are unconstitutional. In Moody, both cases arose from facial challenges. The Supreme Court found that both lower courts erred by assessing the facial challenges as if they were as-applied challenges, connected to limited scenarios and fact sets.

As explained in the 9-0 opinion:

The courts mainly addressed what the parties had focused on. And the parties mainly argued these cases as if the laws applied only to the curated feeds offered by the largest and most paradigmatic social-media platforms … But argument in this Court revealed that the laws might apply to, and differently affect, other kinds of websites and apps. In a facial challenge, that could well matter, even when the challenge is brought under the First Amendment. … The question in such a case is whether a law’s unconstitutional applications are substantial compared to its constitutional ones. To make that judgment, a court must determine a law’s full set of applications, evaluate which are constitutional and which are not, and compare the one to the other. Neither court performed that necessary inquiry.

In a statement, NetChoice  lauded the opinion as “a victory for First Amendment rights online,”