The Supreme Court puzzles over social-media regulations

IN THE MIDDLE of a four-hour Supreme Court debate on February 26th over state laws regulating , Justice Samuel Alito asked Paul Clement, the platforms’ lawyer, to imagine that “YouTube were a newspaper”. How much, Justice Alito asked, “would it weigh?” The snark was directed at Mr Clement’s suggestion that Facebook, YouTube and their ilk deserve editorial control over the content they host just as newspapers are free to decide which articles appear on their broadsheets.If Justice Alito was sceptical of the regulators’ comparisons of platforms to telegraph companies (which must dispatch all messages, not just the ones they agree with), he was downright hostile to the newspaper analogy. But Mr Clement had a rejoinder: a paper version of YouTube “would weigh an enormous amount, which is why, in order to make it useful, there’s actually more editorial discretion going on in these cases” than in any of the others that have come before the court.