Moody v. NetChoice — Reddit moderators' Supreme Court amicus brief (2024)

In the consolidated cases Moody v. NetChoice, LLC (No. 22-277) and NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton (No. 22-555), the Supreme Court reviewed Texas's HB 20 and Florida's SB 7072 — laws that sought to restrict how large platforms moderate user content. On 7 December 2023, two Reddit-related amicus briefs were filed in support of the platforms' position.

The first was an unusual brief from the volunteer moderators of the r/law and r/SCOTUS communities, filed by counsel Gabriel Latner. The moderators argued that volunteer community moderation is itself protected First Amendment editorial activity, and that the Texas and Florida laws would expose ordinary unpaid moderators to personal liability from users whose posts they removed — making volunteer moderation effectively impossible. To illustrate what platforms would be forced to host if they could not curate, the brief attached screenshots of content the moderators had removed, including violent threats against the Justices, doxxing of addresses, and slurs.

The second was a corporate amicus brief from Reddit, Inc., describing Reddit's distinctive community-governance model — subreddit-level moderation combined with site-wide upvote and downvote systems — as protected editorial activity that the challenged laws would disrupt. Together, the briefs gave the Court an unusually concrete picture of how moderation works from the bottom up, voiced by the people who actually do it.

On 1 July 2024, the Supreme Court unanimously vacated and remanded both the Fifth and Eleventh Circuit decisions, holding that the lower courts had failed to conduct a proper facial First Amendment analysis. Justice Kagan's majority opinion strongly affirmed platforms' editorial rights, reasoning that an entity 'compiling and curating others' speech into an expressive product of its own' is engaged in protected expression, and that a state 'may not interfere with private actors' speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance.'

While the Court did not finally resolve the constitutionality of the two laws, its reasoning was widely read as a major affirmation of content-moderation rights. The Reddit moderators' brief drew particular attention as a rare instance of anonymous volunteers participating directly in a Supreme Court case to defend the work they do, and the Court allowed them to do so without disclosing their real identities.