“This session, we took action to ensure that ‘We the People’—real Floridians across the Sunshine State—are guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley elites,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on May 24. “If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable.”
The speech was given at the signing of Florida Senate Bill 7072, a bill that aims to prevent major social media platforms from “deplatforming” (banning or otherwise censoring) users. The law has been criticized by internet freedom advocates such as Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who argued that the policy “is mostly performative, as it almost certainly will be found unconstitutional” under existing Supreme Court decisions.
Regardless of the law’s survival, DeSantis’s talk about the consistent enforcement of rules is undermined by the statutory language. Buried in the bill’s definition of a “social media platform,” a specific exception to the law was added: “The term does not include any information service, system, Internet search engine, or access software provider operated by a company that owns and operates a theme park or entertainment complex.”
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