Was the Supreme Court Missing the Big Picture When It Comes to Tech?

“Private companies like Facebook and Twitter are the focal points of more political debate now than any physical space controlled by the government.”

Liberals and conservatives can agree on little in 2019, but one thing that unites both sides of the aisle is a growing sense of distrust toward big tech—everywhere, so it seems, but at the Supreme Court.

The highest court in the nation issued a set of decisions Monday covering contentious issues from racial gerrymandering to criminal justice, and one decision, unlike the previous two, featured the familiar liberal-conservative split: Manhattan Community Access v. Halleck. On its face, Manhattan Community Access has little to do with the world of Internet behemoths; the decision focused on whether a private company operating a public access cable channel in New York City is required to honor the free speech of those using its platform. Two filmmakers claimed that the company violated their First Amendment rights by refusing to run their film, a documentary critical of the company.

Yet some of the Internet’s biggest companies, like Facebook, Twitter and Google, were hard at work prior to the resolution of the case convincing the Court not to draw any comparisons between the case and their own privately-hosted platforms, and their efforts look to have paid off. Writing for the five-vote majority, Justice Kavanaugh explicitly applied its reasoning only to “the case before us” and found that the company operating the public access channel was not bound to honor the filmmakers’ freedom of speech. At the same time, the decision, nominally limited to the facts at hand, appears to limit unwisely the reach of the First Amendment at a time when the ever-changing nature of free speech online requires—if anything—more flexibility.