A landmark Supreme Court fight over social media now looks likely

The stakes are high because of the increasingly dominant role platforms such as Twitter and Facebook play in American democracy and elections

“To the extent that politicians have spread conspiracy theories or incitement, that will no longer be grounds for platforms taking them down,” said Evelyn Douek, who teaches about the regulation of online speech at Stanford Law School. Social media platforms, she added, may be forced to keep “a lot of horrible and otherwise hateful speech” that they currently remove and “may become unusable.”