Munger, Tolles & Olson’s Jonathan Blavin and Helen White Pen Article Discussing Supreme Court Rulings That Provide Certainty to Online Platforms in an Election Year

Munger, Tolles & Olson partner Jonathan Blavin and associate Helen White co-authored an article titled “Election Outlook: A Precedent Primer On Content Moderation,” published by Law360.

As the 2024 election cycle heats up, political campaigns are utilizing memes, images generated by artificial intelligence and viral videos to engage their base. Yet as the presidential election nears, the rise of misinformation, disinformation and other schemes intended to disenfranchise voters loom, posing challenging content moderation decisions for online platforms.

In their article, Mr. Blavin and Ms. White discuss how the U.S. Supreme Court’s most recent term provided much-needed certainty to online platforms seeking to combat misinformation in an election year. The article details how the Supreme Court rejected two decisions handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that threatened to substantially curtail platforms’ ability to moderate content freely, and clarified that well-established laws, which have governed offline publications since their inception, still apply to online platforms.

The Supreme Court’s rulings in Moody v. NetChoice and Murthy v. Missouri provide platforms with a solid legal foundation to combat the ever-present risk of viral political misinformation in the 2024 election season and solidified First Amendment protection for online platforms’ core moderation features, the authors state.

“Platforms may receive from and share information with local, state and federal governments related to identifying election interference and disinformation,” write Mr. Blavin and Ms. White. “Platforms also may deplatform, deprioritize or attach warnings and labels to content that violates their community guidelines or otherwise presents risks to their users — even when it is posted by a politically significant user.”

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