On Monday, the Supreme Court reversed two court rulings on Republican-backed laws from Florida and Texas meant to restrict social media firms' capacity to filter material on their sites.

Noting that lower courts had failed to properly examine the First Amendment objections to the statutes, the Supreme Court is forwarding both cases back to them for additional scrutiny.

"In such a case, the issue is whether the unconstitutional applications of a law are significant relative to its constitutional ones," Justice Elena Kagan noted in the ruling. "A court must ascertain the whole spectrum of applications of a legislation, assess which are constitutional and which are not, and then compare the one with the other in order to render that conclusion. Neither court conducted the required necessary research.

Adopted in 2021, both regulations sought to answer grievances from conservatives who felt social media firms such as Facebook and X (previously Twitter) were unlawfully suppressing conservative political opinions. The worries grew more intense after Facebook and X deleted former president Donald Trump's accounts following the Capitol building attack on January 6.

The legislation sought to prevent social media corporations from deleting specific political accounts or messages. The trials might decide whether social media firms ought to be allowed to control hate speech, false information about elections, spam on their own platforms.

Arguing that the rules violated the speech rights of the social media sites, NetChoice, a tech sector lobbying group, filed to have the laws overturned. The group contended that the provisions give the government undue authority over material posted on privately held social media sites.

Lower courts decided differently on the laws as Texas law was maintained but important Florida law measures were denied. Neither statute, however, has been implemented; both were put on hold until the Supreme Court rendered its ruling.