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This essay was by The Dallas Express on July 21, 2025.

Don’t want to publish an opinion on your blog you disagree with? Too bad, the government forces you to publish it. Criticize the mayor? Go to jail  — and good luck trying to sue the mayor for violating your First Amendment rights. Want to access online content legal for adults without jeopardizing your privacy and reputation? Think again, your state legislature demands you reveal your identity first.

That’s not the America I know. Nor is it one a robust First Amendment would ever allow. But those constitutional threats came up before the Supreme Court during its past two terms, thanks to state legislatures and government officials who would prefer to play thought police instead of obey the First Amendment’s commands.

For the most part, the Supreme Court did as it has for decades: It upheld the First Amendment as a mighty check on government intrusion into our thoughts, on public debate, and in the search for truth. Still, a couple of the Court’s decisions this year broke from that trend, causing First Amendment defenders everywhere to raise their collective eyebrows.

Americans’ pilgrimage to the online world has placed free speech on the internet at the forefront of the Court’s recent First Amendment decisions. And that includes a case involving our Lone Star State. Last July, in Moody v. Netchoice, the Supreme Court considered Texas and Florida laws that tried to dictate how social media companies decide what political and ideological content to allow, and how to present it.

Before the Supreme Court sent the cases back to the appeals courts for another look, it made one thing clear: The First Amendment bars the government from telling social media platforms what they can and can’t publish, just as it bars the government from telling newspaper editors what they can or can’t print. As Justice Kagan remarked, “on the spectrum of dangers to free expression, there are few greater than allowing the government to change the speech of private actors in order to achieve its own conception of speech nirvana.”

In another pair of rulings, the Supreme Court considered two instances of local officials blocking citizens from commenting on the officials’ social media pages about the government’s performance. Although the Court didn’t rule in favor of either party, it confirmed the First Amendment limits officials’ power to block Americans from commenting on social media pages an official uses to conduct government business.

With these social media decisions, the Court underscored that core First Amendment principles apply just as strongly in the digital age, helping to secure free speech online from government overreach.

On the other hand, this most recent Supreme Court term found the Court twice deferring to governmental regulations of online expression. First, in TikTok v. Garland, the Court held the federal government’s effective ban on the popular social media app TikTok does not violate the First Amendment, even as half the United States uses the platform to speak and to receive information. The Court largely yielded to the government’s asserted concerns over national security, despite, as many pointed out, Congress’s failure to provide enough evidence showing TikTok poses a national security threat. In fact, the administration’s continued unwillingness to enforce the ban punctuates how suspect Congress’s national security concerns were.

And in another decision, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Court upheld Texas’s law requiring adults to verify their age before accessing websites with sexually explicit material that is, while legal for adults, “obscene for minors.” Breaking from decades-old prior precedent that invalidated similar laws, the Court held the First Amendment doesn’t protect adults “accessing material obscene to minors” until they verify their age — even though that material enjoys full First Amendment protection.

While the Court noted the accepted practice of ID checks for sexually explicit material in the physical world, it all but skirted the unique and serious privacy implications digital ID checks impose, in a time where Americans suffer harm from regular data breaches. Those privacy scares will chill many adults from seeking speech the First Amendment protects for their use.

For all that, both the TikTok and Free Speech Coalition decisions are narrow ones. So on the whole, they should not undermine the broad protections for internet speech the Supreme Court has confirmed in prior terms. Still, any time the government censors speech on shaky evidence about national security concerns, or tries to burden adult access to protected speech in the name of childproofing the internet, it raises a First Amendment red flag that should concern us all.

Outside of the digital world, the Supreme Court handed down several decisions over the last two terms vindicating the First Amendment as a vital check on overzealous government officials abusing their power to silence opinions they don’t like. For instance, in NRA v. Vullo, the Supreme Court held officials in New York violated the First Amendment when they coerced financial services and insurers and underwriters to sever ties with the National Rifle Association — all because the state disagreed with the NRA’s constitutionally protected advocacy. That’s hugely important for freedom of speech, affirming that the government can’t strong-arm third-parties into silencing Americans because of the views they express.

Another decision centered on a San Antonio-area woman was a good step towards ensuring government critics have a robust remedy when officials wrongfully arrest them. In Gonzalez v. Trevino, the Supreme Court clarified that Sylvia Gonzalez, a long-time government critic, could sue the local officials who singled her out for arrest after she called for the city manager’s removal.

And just this May, the Supreme Court halted the Maine Legislature’s denial of State Representative Laurel Libby’s right to vote just because the legislature’s political majority took offense to the lawmaker’s First Amendment-protected social media post about a transgender athlete participating in a high school event. Not only did the majority’s act infringe Rep. Libby’s First Amendment right to comment on public issues, it also deprived her constituents of the representation our republican form of government guarantees.

At its core, the Court’s ruling in Libby v. Fecteau underscored a vital constitutional principle: Political majorities cannot censor and exclude others from the democratic process based on the views they express. That’s a first principle worth upholding, no matter where a speaker falls on the ideological spectrum.

And we should all be glad the Supreme Court upheld that principle here, in a time where protecting the uniquely American freedoms to dissent and voice our opinions without fear of the government’s strong hand is as important as ever.