PruneYard Shopping: Are the Speech Rights of Shopping Centers Really Like Those of Social Media?

​The Cato Institute’s recent amicus brief making the case that social media laws passed by the states of Texas and Florida are unconstitutional also takes aim at a precedent from 1980, PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins. Cato’s brief raises the question: Does it make sense to analogize the speech rights of those who own a physical property with those who own a social media company?
 
In PruneYard, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the California Constitution protected reasonably exercised speech on the privately owned PruneYard shopping center against the owner’s wishes. The Court noted the California Constitution has broader protections for speech than the Bill of Rights. The Court correctly reasoned that states can have greater and positive protections for speech than the negatively defined rights of the First Amendment, which forbids government censorship and curtailments of speech rights.
 
Based on this singular insight, the Court’s opinion established that the shopping center could not prevent outsiders from protesting or soliciting for political purposes on its private property.
 
In its brief, Cato argues that the Supreme Court should at the proper time address this odd ruling and hold that forcing private property owners to accommodate on their premises speech they do not support is a violation of the property owners’ First Amendment rights. Cato also argues that social media platforms should similarly be protected from being forced to carry the speech of others. While Protect The 1st agrees with Cato that the Texas and Florida laws are unconstitutional, the analogy to PruneYard is flawed. Cato’s comparison with real property, however, remains useful, offering an illuminating look at what is unique about social media.
 
As Protect The 1st previously reported, the Florida law would prohibit social media platforms from removing the posts of political candidates, while the Texas law would bar companies from removing posts based on a poster’s political ideology. The former law was struck down by the Eleventh Circuit, while the latter was upheld by the Fifth Circuit. Both cases are now headed to what promises to be a landmark digital speech review by the Supreme Court.
 
But is the extension of the critiques of the PruneYard applicable to social media? This seems inapt because property owners who allow outsiders to mount politically-charged events on their premises might face liability for that speech, just as newspapers can be sued for speech contained in letters-to-the-editor. Social media is different. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a government grant of immunity to social media platforms for third-party speech, while allowing some discretion for the platforms to moderate content. 
 
Despite frustrations over actual content management by social media companies, and government involvement in it, Section 230 has allowed a thriving online world to develop – along, of course, with all the attendant psychic garbage. This is utterly unlike shopping centers, which don’t enjoy any such government immunity and could be held legally accountable for the speech that occurs on their property.
 
The two state laws have obvious First Amendment flaws and striking them down doesn’t require revising precedents.
 
The authors of the Texas and Florida laws, concerned about the manipulation of the online debate, would further intrude government meddling into social media content moderation. This power would likely extend far beyond what these politicians imagine (and perhaps even to their specific detriment). We suggest the Supreme Court take a more straightforward analysis of the Florida and Texas laws as it invalidates them under the First Amendment.