Johns Hopkins Undergraduate Law Review | Volume 3

Page 11

Twitter’s Presidential Censorship Analyzing Section 230’s Constitutionality and Exploring Future Reform Stephen Dai

Abstract As a result of Twitter's recent guidelines on maintaining election integrity and preventing pandemic misinformation, former President Trump and his supporters have been the recipients of Twitter's regulatory actions. Former President Trump has openly denounced Twitter's actions as unconstitutional censorship and urged for the repeal of Section 230, which provides Twitter and other Internet Service Providers with arbitrary moderating power. This paper aims to address the claims of First Amendment violations Former President Trump makes in an Executive Order he issued in May. By examining the courts' treatment of First Amendment rights on private property in PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins, Southeastern Promotions v. Conrad, and Knight v. Trump, among other cases, I conclude that Twitter's actions ultimately represent a Constitutional censorship of speech. Regardless of this conclusion, I still agree with former President Trump and other lawmakers' assertions that Twitter's regulatory power under Section 230 requires reform. After exploring lawmakers' approaches and relevant case law, I finally determine that the phrase "otherwise objectionable" found in Section 230(c)(2)(A) is the root of the problem, so I propose an amendment to the law that narrows its scope by explicitly defining the categories of speech that Internet Service Providers are allowed to moderate.

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