Alito Wants To Weigh YouTube, And The Rest Of SCOTUS Wants To Make An Easy Case Hard
from the court-watching-as-an-endurance-sport dept
As Mike already noted, the weirdest moment of the nearly four-hour, double-case hearing at the Supreme Court on Monday in the NetChoice and CCIA legal challenges of Florida’s and Texas’s social media laws came maybe two thirds into the oral argument, when Justice Alito openly wondered, “If YouTube were a newspaper, how much would it weigh?” I was in the courtroom when he said it, but I have no more insight into what analytical issue he was wrestling with that could have prompted this inquiry to counsel than anyone who listened to the hearing remotely or read it in the transcript.
It should therefore not come as much of a shock to suggest that Justice Alito seemed to have had the least amount of sympathy for, or understanding of, NetChoice’s and CCIA’s arguments. It might however be a surprise that Justice Kavanaugh had the most. Perhaps not, as Mike observed, given that he was the author of the Halleck decision, where he displayed some significant interest in protective First Amendment doctrine. On the other hand, the politics of this case do not follow a traditional red-blue breakdown. If they did, one might expect a conservative justice to side with conservative government officials. But, like we noted with the 303 Creative case, the principle of First Amendment protection transcends politics. A lot of people read that case as conservative justices favoring conservative views because they preferred those views. But the reality is that the constitutional rule the Court announced there benefits everyone, no matter what views they have to express, because it tells the government that it doesn’t get to trump them when it doesn’t like them. Which is basically what these cases are about: governments trying to trump expression when it doesn’t like the views it expressed.
And Justice Kavanaugh in particular appeared most able to see that this was the issue at the heart of the case. The arguments that the states kept making, that they passed these laws in response to “censorship” fell flat before him, because over and over he kept reminding that “censorship” requires state action. Which destroyed any justification Florida and Texas claimed to defend their laws. Ultimately Florida and Texas were complaining about the expressive decisions of a private actor, and using their laws to take away the ability of this private actor to continue to make them. In other words, it was their state action that was now determining what expression could or could not appear online, which is the very essence of what is complained about when one complains of censorship, and what the First Amendment most definitely forbids.
The big question raised by these cases is whether the Court would recognize that it does offend a First Amendment right of the platforms when governments try to take away their ability to make those choices. Would the Court see that, just as it recognized that newspapers had the right to choose what op-eds to run, which no law could interfere with, so, too, do the platforms have the freedom to choose what user expression to either facilitate or moderate away?
Or at least it should have been the big question. Because it did seem that there were at least five justices who understood the implications of platforms not having that freedom, and who found the states’ arguments referencing the Court’s earlier rulings in Pruneyard and Turner – where the Court had limited an intermediary’s expressive discretion – to be inapplicable analogies. But it was not quite clear that NetChoice and CCIA will be able to walk away with the win that they should, and these laws remaining enjoined, because there seemed to be at least two issues bogging down the Court’s overall thinking.
One was that the procedural posture of the case seemed to displease them. The justices did not seem to like that it was a “facial challenge,” as opposed to an “as applied challenge.” With the latter, the plaintiffs would complain how a law hurt them, whereas with the former the argument is that the law is a fundamentally unconstitutional effort that needs to be stopped before it can hurt anyone. The problem with this sort of challenge though is that a law might be unconstitutional in some ways it would be applied, but fine in other contexts, and the facial challenge paints the whole thing with the same broad “unconstitutional” brush, which might not be a fair assessment of the whole law.
Of course, let’s remember what was going on when these particular laws were passed. Governors DeSantis of Florida and Abbott of Texas were very unhappy that some speakers and speech had been removed from certain large social media sites. These laws both seemed to be very transparent efforts to punish those sites for having made those expressive moderation choices and make sure they could not make them again. In fact, remember that Florida’s law originally had the “theme park” exemption, where, back when DeSantis still liked Disney, he made sure that the law wouldn’t reach any site owned by Disney and impinge on its moderation choices. And then, when he got mad at Disney, he got the law changed to make sure they were subject to it too.
So when presented with these rather baldfaced attempts to interfere with platforms’ First Amendment rights to moderate their sites as they saw fit, NetChoice and CCIA did not hesitate to sue on behalf of the platforms that would be affected. And as part of the lawsuit it asked for the laws to be enjoined, because one should not have to wait to be injured by an unconstitutional law before being able to show the courts that it would cause an unconstitutional injury. Instead that injury should be headed off at the pass, which is what preliminary injunctions are for. Which doesn’t mean that if there is a redeemable part of the law it can’t later be upheld, but it does mean that when an injury is shown to be likely we keep the status quo in place, with no injury risked, while we fully explore the question of just how unconstitutional the law is.
Furthermore, as NetChoice and CCIA pointed out, it wasn’t like the states defended their laws by saying they had also constitutional applications. Both Texas and Florida overtly wanted to do what NetChoice and CCIA feared: usurp platforms’ editorial discretion. Either the First Amendment lets Florida and Texas do this, or it doesn’t, and that’s why both parties centered that question in their litigation strategy, which was very strange for the Court to now second guess. NetChoice further noted that when it came to a law that violated the First Amendment, it would also be a problem if facial challenges to such laws could be stymied by lawmakers simply slipping in a provision that might be sometimes legitimate because it would mean that lawmakers could get away with causing an unconstitutional injury if that pretextual provision made the law now untouchable by the courts until that injury had accrued.
And then there was a second major point of confusion that arose for the justices on Monday, and Justice Gorsuch in particular, who wondered what the effect would be on Section 230 if they ruled in NetChoice and CCIA’s favor. The answer: there is no effect, but the problem is that it betrays a pretty significant misunderstanding of Section 230 to think there would be.
What seems to confuse is that when it comes to Section 230 platforms basically argue, “It is not our speech at issue,” and in the context of these cases, the platforms are basically arguing that it is their speech at issue. And how could both be true? But the reason both can be true is because when it comes to online speech there is more than one expressive act at issue. One of the major ways Section 230 operates is to make clear that the expressive message of the user is the user’s alone, and if there’s an issue with that message responsibility for it lies exclusively with the user who expressed it. Which is why platforms argue, when raising a Section 230 defense, that it is not their speech. Whereas what is at issue in the litigation here is the separate message platforms convey when they allow users to use their sites to spread their messages, or otherwise deny certain speakers or speech. Allowing (or denying) speech amounts to platforms saying the separate message — and their own message — of what speech they welcome. But that speech they welcome is still not their speech, but that of the user.
I wish this point had been emphasized more during the argument, but NetChoice/CCIA did drive home the separate point that Section 230 is obviously not in conflict with platforms having First Amendment rights preserving editorial discretion because part of its protection is designed to protect platforms when they exercise that discretion. The other major way Section 230 operates is to insulate platforms from liability arising from the acts they take to disallow speech. Congress wanted platforms to take steps to remove objectionable content, NetChoice/CCIA reminded the Court, and wrote the statute to make sure they could. So at minimum, even if platforms did not have the Constitutional right to moderate content, Section 230 would still give them the statutory right, and preempt states like Florida and Texas from messing with that protection, as these laws do. But in reality platforms have both rights, the First Amendment right to do this moderation and the statutory right to make sure that no one can try to take issue with how they’ve done so. These rights complement, not conflict, and hopefully the Court will not be distracted by misunderstandings that might suggest otherwise.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, as applied challenge, content moderation, facial challenge, florida, section 230, social media, supreme court, texas
Companies: ccia, netchoice
Comments on “Alito Wants To Weigh YouTube, And The Rest Of SCOTUS Wants To Make An Easy Case Hard”
Alito is grasping at straws because he wants to force Youtube to host more Nazi content than it already does.
Youtube would weigh 131.4 million metric tons annually if a newspaper says chatgpt
If YouTube were a newspaper, how much would it weigh?
ChatGPT
Calculating how much YouTube would weigh if it were a newspaper involves several estimations, including the amount of data YouTube hosts and the equivalent amount of printed paper that data would represent. Let’s approach this with some assumptions and simplifications:
Using these assumptions, we can estimate the total weight of YouTube if it were a newspaper. Let’s do the math.
If YouTube were a newspaper, based on the rough estimations and assumptions made, it would weigh approximately 131,400,000,000 kilograms (or about 131.4 million metric tons) annually. This calculation is highly speculative and serves to illustrate the vast amount of data hosted on YouTube in a tangible way. The actual figure could vary significantly based on the specific details and assumptions applied.
Re:
Excellent reply! I was doing the same, but trying to keep to human-graspable numbers. The average newspaper (daily published) is around 11,000 words and weighs about 1kg.
A 2 hour movie averages about 11,000 words. So one newspaper.
YouTube claims about 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. So around 250kg (550lbs) every single minute. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That’s a lot! Roughly 33,000lbs!!!
But to put this in very simple terms: if YouTube were a newspaper and printed out every single video uploaded as such, the output every hour would weigh as much as a city bus.
How knowing that helps Alito I have no clue.
Also this gets better if you instead print every single frame instead of printing words. At newspaper resolutions, you’d want 4 frames per quarter page, so 32 frames front and back. That is slightly over one second per page (assuming YT standard 30 frames per second). One page weighs 5 grams, we print 1,687,500 pages per hour to get a whopping 8,437.5kg (16,875lbs), or about half the weight of just printing the words.
Again, no idea how this helps, but it was fun to math!
Impeach Alito
Alito’s comment indicates he either doesn’t grasp the issue at hand, or, is just determined to rule against it.
Either way, it illustrates that he has no business being involved in this decision. Or even being on the court.
Re:
Why would he bother grasping it in the first place if he was already determined to rule against it?
Re: Re:
“I don’t know what it is, but I hate it.” – Sheriff Bart
Re: Educate Alito
What is it with you people and “kick him out of office” as if The Next Guy is going to automatically be better?
There are some people, some offices, where the behavior is performative – you know that the officeholder Knows Better Than That. You can’t fix those people. Fine, kick them out.
Then there are folks like Alito, who hold opinions you don’t like but can generally tolerate, who may genuinely not get the point you’re trying to make. These people you can educate. They will get your point. They might not agree with you. They might not vote the way you want them to. But they get the issue.
The Next Guy won’t get the issue, because he hasn’t been shown the issue. You doom yourself to cycling people through the office because you can’t be bothered.
Re: Re:
Your point only makes sense if replacing him would install another Republican pick but Biden is the President and the Senate is in Democratic hands so the uneducable Alito who went to the words of a literal witch hunter from centuries ago to overturn Roe should indeed be replaced if we have the power to do so, which, sadly, we do not. But if we did I think it’s nuts you think it’d be better to educate Alito instead of replacing his sadistic presence. Maybe you can tolerate somebody quoting a literal witch hunter from centuries ago to remove rights from women but I cannot.
Re: Re: Re:
Actually, the phrase you’re looking for is ‘deliberately ineducable Alito’. Alito could easily be educated if he chose to be, but he’s simply too ignorant.
The Roberts Court has never, to my knowledge, ruled in favor of restricting a corporation’s First Amendment rights. Alito has historically been the justice most willing to do so, but only from the minority.
Re:
These aren’t companies though.
They are coastal elite communist big tech socialist mind viruses!
Did I add enough right wing buzz words?
But all that to say is that they want to carve out this specifically for companies they don’t like.
Re: Re:
you forgot woke, but otherwise, an admirable job.
Re: Re:
Did I add enough right wing buzz words?
Almost, but the AC who replied about the absence of ‘woke’ made up the slack. Bingo! by the way…
They are coastal elite communist big tech socialist mind viruses!
And despite that attitude, they’re still sites they consider vital for making sure their ‘message’ gets out. So evil, but yet so necessary.
Re: Re: Re:
Not an AC. 😉
Re: Re: Re:2
My bad, apologies SonicAnatidae.
Re: Re:
Until it hits companies they do like, because carving out specific companies is an impossible task without a First Amendment violation that is completely transparent.
Re: Re: Re:
That’s not entirely accurate. See Bush v Gore, SCOTUS’s ruling that magically, only applied to that specific instance, and in every other similar instance isn’t precedent…somehow.
Re: Re: Re:2
You misspelled the word ‘yet’. This is how Trump plans to get back into the Oval Office if his Russian buddies don’t come through for him again.
If you’re against moderation, you’re against free speech.
Re:
These people are raising hell against moderation because we’re able to maintain spaces where they can’t force Nazi speech in our faces.
Re: Re:
That should be more than sufficient to tell you how they actually feel about both free speech and free assocation.
If they could, they would force us to host Nazi proselytizers in our living rooms each and every morning.
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Re:
“Moderation” (you mean censorship) definitely isn’t free speech, no. That’s just a dumb thing MM says.
Re: Re:
Son, don’t you think you’ve embarrassed yourself enough for one day?
Re: Re:
Let me know where your home is so I can exercise my free speech by having a company wrap your home in advertising for Ru Paul’s Drag Race and companies that sell PrEP.
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Re: Re: Re:
Miss, you seem confused.
Re: Re: Re:2
So you’re saying you’re gay?
Re: Re: Re:2
Matthew, so you hate private property ownership?
Re: Re:
So I assume you want to jail everyone who tells someone not to cuss?
Re: Re:
“Censorship” (you mean forcing speech) definitely isn’t free speech, no. That’s just a dumb thing you say.
Re: Re:
You claiming that people don’t have a right to respond to you doesn’t make it true. This seems to be the major issue with morons – you don’t understand that when you exercise your free speech other people have the right to exercise their free speech in turn. “Free speech” doesn’t mean that you’re free from consequences of that speech, and if the consequence is another private actor telling you to STFU, that’s their right as much as it was your right to be an idiot in public to begin with.
It’s yet to be proven that 303 Creative will be applied equally and benefit everyone. Show me where in real life 303 Creative has let a gay website designer deny expressive service because they didn’t want to celebrate a Christian wedding, and maybe it’ll be proven. Until then, the “benefits everyone” is something that solely exists on paper, rather than reality.
Re:
It would be funny to watch liberals bend over backwards to continue giving the fascists every benefit of the doubt, were it not so horrifying.
Hypocrisy is a feature of fascism. Fascism literally cannot exist within logically consistent confines. Its current prevalence suggests that such logical consistency is already missing.
Re: Re: Wet cleanup on aisle 2
You forgot to credit chatGPT for that little puddle of word vomit.
Re: Re: Re:
QQ more, fash.
Re: Re: Re:2
It’s always fun watching a grown ass man try to pull a “How do you do fellow kids?” In real life.
Re: Re: Re:3
I’m not your fellow, kid.
Re: Re: Re:4
I’m not your buddy, pal.
How much does Youtube weigh
I think the issue is that Alito has no clue what “youtube” is. He probably doesn’t use the internet and didn’t bother (or want) to ask his clerks to research and explain it to him. All he knows is that youtube is a big “woke” company (probably because Faux News said it is) and therefore he dislikes it.
Re:
If Youtube weighs as much as a duck, then it’s a Republican witch-hunt.
Re: Re:
The Republicans turned me into a newt!
Re: Re: Re:
… a newt?
Re: Re: Re:2
I got better…
Re: Re: Re:
I guess your joke is based on the fact that those leading witch hunts are often the most guilty of the offenses (actual as well as invented) they charge others with.
Has SCOTUS published their surge pricing list yet?
I’d really like to start a fund to buy them taking the side of anyone other than corporations and religious nutjobs.
Re:
It’s an invite-only kind of thing.
Only if we’re assuming SCOTUS applies the principle equally. Which is not always good assumption, these days. Alito and others have shown they’re perfectly willing to play by different rules for different views, and come up with a fig leaf to justify it.
Among other things, this question is weird because it seems to imply comparing a single issue of a newspaper to the entirety of Youtube. But Youtube isn’t made available as individual issues, and newspapers in general have been attempting to become less focused on print for decades (and also have been around for far longer). If you truly attempted to make an apples-to-apples comparison of total content (I dunno, maybe by only taking into account subtitles and thumbnails instead of full videos?), Youtube would probably still win for sheer amount, but it might not be nearly as large of a difference as Alito thought when voicing that.
Re: Comparing apples to the moon
Let’s be fair. A standard newspaper is one day’s worth of information.
So let’s use one day’s worth of YouTube videos. By 2022 numbers, that’s >500 hours uploaded every minute. So >720k hours uploaded every day. Still massively different from a newspaper to the point that the comparison is insane, but more acceptable than comparing one newspaper to the entirety of YouTube’s years worth of content.
I wonder how Alito imagines this. Shipping the “newspaper” as portable drive(s)? Or printing the binary video files on paper for maximum inefficiency? (Or encoded on DNA and carried by butterflies. Just a random example.)
Anyway, I don’t know where his mind was at, but this reminds me of a saying: “there is no stupid question.”
To which I’d reply, “it depends on the context”. Here, it definitely is a stupid question. But it would make a fun submission to Randall Munroe’s “What if?”.
I don’t recall any of them asking another important question: What if we allowed these types of laws and each of the 50 states decided to draft their own laws, many of which would be incompatible with each other? And why would this not be a federal issue rather than a state issue, since all agree it is an interstate commerce issue.
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Re:
Most laws are for the states to decide. Federal law is ALLOWED to regulate interstate law (otherwise it could not) but it’s not like states can’t.
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Alito was saying storage on Youtube is essentially infinite
It’s not infinite, but it’s not highly space-limited like a Newspaper is. A newspaper can only allow so many words because eventually it just physically gets too heavy, particularly over many copies. Hence “how much does it weigh?”
If that comparison went over your head, maybe you shouldn’t be commenting on tech issues, particular ones involving precedents that applied to physical media.
Re:
Soup Pie Cane
covfefe?
Re: Re:
Why was this flagged? Repeating Trumpisms like these is funny, not harmful.
Re: Re: Re:
Apologies. I guess the unhide function screwed up (again), so I wound up talking about a comment that wasn’t actually hidden.
Re:
Hamberder
Re:
Yeah guys. Alito is just pretending to be an idiot.
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Re: Re:
Yes….who’s the idiot…the graduate of Princeton and Yale Law and noted legal scholar, or some yahoos on the internet (including Mike) who can’t grasp a simple analogy for limited vs unlimited content capacity?
Re: Re: Re:
I mean, I did explain that very point in my post yesterday, and you insisted I was too stupid to understand it (while at the same time getting Section 230 exactly 100% backwards).
Maybe… just maybe… you feel like you need to disagree with everything I write because you’re just the asshole?
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Re: Re: Re:2
More that I don’t think you do so in good faith. You understood the point he was making, then ascribed motives and partisanship, like a tool. In fact these questions are usually socratic and may often be against the justices preferred position which properly they have not decided and are still weighing multiple factors for and against. Of course you know all this you just are being a hyper partisan “asshole”
But hey, tell me how section 230 protects newspapers from all liability just cuz they’re on internet, right?
Re: Re: Re:3
Nice strawman, dumbass.
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Re: Re: Re:4
It was a call out, actually. It’s the literally logical conclusion of the (completely legally false) argument he was making in a different thread.
Re: Re: Re:5
oh look it’s the revenge porn clown
Re: Re: Re:5
When you intentionally misrepresent arguments, it’s a strawman.
But it’s okay, we know that you struggle with logic.
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Re: Re: Re:6
It’s not my fault you’re not smart enough to follow along.
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Re: Re: Re:6
I write logic (software) 8 hours a day, so its has nothing to do with logic. It may be hard for people to understand, but congress specifically said they didn’t want to immunize “cancel-botting” on usenet, because of concerns that they had about internet censorship with them, and specifically wanted to put the users in control of what the users see.
https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/104th-congress/senate-report/230/1
Re: Re: Re:3
If someone has motives and partisanship, how can anyone else ascribe them to that individual?
Re: Re: Re:3
…is the closest to truth you have ever come.
Re: Re: Re:3
I did no such thing. I said nothing about partisanship, in fact, because I don’t believe it was partisan.
Why do you lie when it’s so easy to prove you wrong?
Such projection.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Nonetheless you suggested partisanship.
Perhaps you should try to write more clearly then?
Do you..do you think voicing opinions “proves” me wrong, somehow?
Did you EVER take a logics class?
Re: Re: Re:3
One day, the anti-230 morons might stumble across what it actually says and address that instead of the weird hallucinations they base their world view on.
Today, apparently, is not that day.
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Re: Re: Re:2
Maybe he disagrees, because he read the senate conference notes for section 230, where congress said that 230 was passed to give common carriers immunity, and in the 1996 telecommunications at writ large, which actually has a definition of “electronic publisher” that excludes social networking platforms and video on demand services like Youtube from the “electronic publisher” definition
https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/104th-congress/senate-report/230/1
Re: Re: Re:3
Your inability to understand what you’re looking at is no excuse for spreading lies Ben.
The discussion over 230 says no such thing.
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Re: Re: Re:4
ORLY?
Man, you don’t read so good.
No no, don’t “explain it to me”, I can fuucking read, thanks. Looks to me like he understands what he’s looking at just fine.
Re: Re: Re:5
Do you even understand context? Do you ever read more than the tidbit you think proves your point? Did you really think the document only pertained to section 230?
Lets list what part that quote belongs to:
Subtitle B–Special Provisions Concerning Bell Operating Companies
* Sec. 151. Bell operating company provisions.
* * SEC. 274. ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING BY BELL OPERATING COMPANIES.
* * * (h) Definition of Electronic Publishing
* * * * (2) Exceptions.–The term `electronic publishing’ shall not include the following services:
* * * * * (O) Video programming or full motion video entertainment on demand.
You should get your own theme song about being wrong.
Re: Re: Re:3
Yes, immunity for statements that the website (or those working on it) did not make, and are therefore not responsible for. Do you have to work on being this obtuse, or dies it just come naturally?
Re: Re: Re:
Well, either he is stupid. Or he is evil and criminal. Your choice.
Re: Re: Re:2
Ypu can be all 3.
I mean, Trump.
Re:
So the amount of letters you can display dictate your rights?
Did you think that through at all?
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Re: Re:
It affects whether you could be considered publisher of limited curated space or a common carrier. Is the amount of content you can carry a limited resource that needs to be allocated, or is it not? Are you more like a newspaper or a telephone?
Did you? Mike and Cathy didn’t, which is why I’m laughing at them.
Re: Re: Re:
… You haven’t though.
Should a newspaper that uses a smaller print than another have less rights?
Should book publishers have less rights than magazine publishers?
How do you refine digital storage? Is it the total sum of all disk capacity? Raw bytes? Or is it the amount of visible content?
Or are you conflating the space on a page to the scale of a website.
By what you seem to argue “considered publisher of limited curated space or a common carrier” all any website would need to do is artificially limit it’s “space” and then split off into multiple websites.
In other words… your idea is horse shit because you have no idea how to think through what you are saying even means.
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Re: Re: Re:2
So, you didn’t think it through it all. And at this point you are commited to refusing to understand it, so there’s not much point to explaining to you.
Also not about rights, specifically, just what kind of entity they are.
If I explain Lorentz conraction to you, and you don’t get it, that doesn’t make special relativity bullshit. Not that this is anywhere near that complicated, you’re just an idiot…and committed to it.
Re: Re: Re:3
“I refuse to explain my point beyond vague terms and you are an idiot for not comprehending my brilliance!” -You
The only one at fault here is the one that refuses to lay out their idea in concrete terms instead of vague ideas that mean nothing.
I still think it’s hilarious though that you and your even dumber leaders that tell you how to think have refused to consider internet providers common carriers while you want the content they serve up to be a common carrier.
Here is a fun and simple test for you.
If the government dictates what speech you can and cannot say, is that censorship?
Re: Re: Re:4
I still think it’s hilarious though that you and your even dumber leaders that tell you how to think have refused to consider internet providers common carriers while you want the content they serve up to be a common carrier.
The explanation for that one’s simple (if hypocritical) enough, they like the companies providing internet service and don’t want to risk losing the bribes/’campaign contributions’ they offer, whereas they don’t like the companies running the social media sites as the platforms don’t bend over backwards enough for them and have the utter audacity to think that rules should apply to them as well.
Re: Re: Re:4
Actually, there’s two guilty of that offense. The first is Bratty Matty, and the second is the subject of the article.
Re: Re: Re:4
LMSTFY: If a government passes laws that regulate what you can and can’t say, that is censorship. If a private company makes rules about what speech they do and do not welcome on their website, that is moderation. And no, Bratty Matty, the two terms are not synonymous, no matter how much you might wish they were.
Re: Re: Re:3
Strong in this one the projection is. Mmm.
Ice floes…
y’all had the right idea once, and now you insist on pretending that with age comes wisdom…
Well how much does the website weigh…
Ice Floes.
I’ll predict it’ll be a 7-2 decision in favor of free speech with Alito and Thomas being the dissenting jackasses.
One of these things is not like the others
230 protects the first amendment rights of sites by making it so that they can afford to exercise them via choosing what content they will and will not allow on their property, and preventing them from being sued over what someone else says using their property.
The state laws in question are aimed at undermining the first amendment rights of online sites by preventing the owners from being able to exercise their rights, barring them from being able to control what speech they will and will not allow on their property.
While the laws are in conflict with the first amendment sites claiming both that 230 allows them to exercise their first amendment rights by removing the speech of others that is posted on their property and condemning the idea of forced association with content and speech they want nothing to do with are not.