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The Supreme Court puzzles over social-media regulations

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IN THE MIDDLE of a four-hour Supreme Court debate on February 26th over state laws regulating social-media sites, 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.

The laws at issue date from 2021, when Republican legislatures in Florida and Texas sought to rein in sites like Facebook and Twitter because they had sidelined anti-vaccine activists and insurrectionists (including a user named Donald Trump). Two industry groups—NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association—quickly sued. Governments cannot constitutionally wrest control of content-moderation from private companies, they argued. After the appellate courts asked to consider the cases split on the question, Moody v NetChoice and NetChoice v Paxton arrived at the Supreme Court.

Justice Alito’s sympathies seemed to lie with Florida and Texas, as did those of Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. The three mused that content moderation is a euphemism for “censorship”, prompting Mr Clement to insist that only the government can properly be said to “censor”. The three also accused the social-media sites of trying to have their cookies and eat them too. In last year’s cases involving Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the companies said they should be immune from liability for dangerous content on their sites; but now they claim to exercise editorial discretion. There’s no double standard, Mr Clement explained in response. An anthologist may decide which short stories to include in a collection but is not herself author of any of the stories.

Mr Clement and Elizabeth Prelogar, President Joe Biden’s solicitor-general, may not have persuaded the most conservative wing of the court to side with the social-media platforms, but five or six justices were worried that the treatment of the companies by Florida and Texas threatened their First Amendment freedoms. Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted the “Orwellian” nature of a state that endeavours to “[take] over media”. The court’s precedents have clarified, he said, “that we have a different model here” and it is not one of “the state interfering with…private choices”.

John Roberts, the chief justice, echoed this sentiment, noting that the court’s “first concern” should be protecting the “modern public square” from state meddling. Justice Sonia Sotomayor voiced concern over laws “that are so broad that they stifle speech”. And Justice Elena Kagan discussed the public utility of sites that quell “misinformation” about voting and public health and filter out hate speech.

If the Supreme Court lets the laws take effect, Mr Clement argued, those priorities would be thrown out of the window. Social-media sites will lose their charm—and worse. With no ability to take down posts based on their ‘”viewpoint”, platforms would have to open their servers to debates they will rue. If you have to be viewpoint-neutral, he said, permitting users to post about suicide-prevention would entail allowing advocacy of suicide-promotion, too. Or “pro-Semitic” posts would mean you’re equally open to antisemitic views. “This is a formula”, he concluded, “for making these websites very unpopular to both users and advertisers.”

Yet worries from a majority of the court about what Ms Prelogar called the laws’ “very clear defect” may not suffice to give what Justice Alito dubbed the “megaliths” of social media a clean win. That’s because Florida’s law, at least, seems sloppily drafted enough to apply not just to giant platforms such as Facebook and YouTube but to e-commerce sites such as Etsy, Uber and Venmo. And NetChoice was seeking to get the laws thrown out entirely rather than merely narrowing their focus.

But, as Justice Kagan pointed out, Florida’s law seems to have a “plainly legitimate sweep”—applications that do not violate the First Amendment because they regulate not speech but conduct (requiring an Uber driver to pick up Republicans as well as Democrats, say). Those constitutional (if not so salient) corners of the law may be enough to thwart the effort to ditch them. A messy consensus seemed to emerge: send the cases back to the lower courts to sort out all the facts. Which means a year or two down the road, the justices may find themselves clicking refresh.

Economics

How one Ivy League university avoided the president’s wrath

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There are all kinds of perks to being the boss, big and small. As George H.W. Bush once said: “I’m president of the United States. And I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!” To be the boss of an Ivy League institution, with its ample salary and cachet, would have seemed a crowning achievement for the aspiring meritocrats of America not long ago. Indeed, in the 20th century, two Ivy League presidents ascended to the White House (Woodrow Wilson led Princeton University and Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded Columbia University after winning the second world war).

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Economics

Mike Waltz’s demotion is a loss for defence hawks

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ON APRIL 30TH Mike Waltz, America’s national security adviser, took his turn in what has become a ritual at Donald Trump’s cabinet meetings: with the cameras rolling the top department heads outdo one another in their praise of the president. Mr Waltz’s turn was hardly the most sycophantic, but he still celebrated Mr Trump for killing terrorists, bringing home American hostages, assembling a great cabinet and restoring the country’s international standing.

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Jobs report Friday to provide important clues on where the economy is heading

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Steven Chechette (C) speaks with a recruiter at the KeySource booth at the Mega JobNewsUSA South Florida Job Fair held in the Amerant Bank Arena on April 30, 2025, in Sunrise, Florida.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

Clues on whether the U.S. economy is merely in a temporary tariff-induced funk or a more damaging longer-turn downtrend should come Friday when the Labor Department releases the April jobs report.

Economists expect nonfarm payrolls to post an increase of 133,000, which would be a steep slide from the 228,000 in March, according to the Dow Jones consensus. However, it would be only slightly below the 152,000 average for the first three months of the year and likely would be enough to hold the unemployment rate around 4.2%.

But a downside surprise could be perilous considering the recent spate of bad economic news and the prevailing angst over the way President Donald Trump is implementing tariffs against U.S. trading partners.

“If it’s around 150,000 give or take, I think all will be forgiven,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “So I think we’ll end the week feeling OK, not great, but OK. Things aren’t falling apart.”

However, Zandi and other economists say financial markets may want to brace for disappointment. Specifically, he has his eye on anything less than 100,000 for payrolls growth, which he expects would cause the dour economic feelings to take over.

“If the number’s 100,000 or anything south of that, then I think I’d watch out,” he said. “Then all the other data will take on greater importance, and people will be marking down their expectations. That could be a tough day in the markets.”

Bad news piles up

Investors this week had to digest a gross domestic product reading that showed the economy contracted 0.3% annualized in the first quarter. They also saw a weak private payrolls reading from ADP, Labor Department reports showing a steeper slide in job openings and an uptick in unemployment claims, plus a mixed bag on inflation readings.

Even with all that, Wall Street hung tough, pushing the Dow Jones Industrial Average near a 2% gain on the week as investors continued to focus on the latest tariff news out of the White House.

Still, a bad jobs report could quickly change that, and there are underlying indications of weakness.

ADP, a sometimes unreliable gauge for the nonfarm payrolls count, reported just 62,000 in private company hiring, well below expectations. At the same time, job openings fell to about 7.2 million, the lowest since September 2024.

Other recent indicators also don’t bode well for the jobs picture. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates surged to 5.8% in March, the highest since July 2021, while the underemployment rate spiked to 41.2%, the highest since February 2022, according to New York Federal Reserve data.

Job fears

Workers also are growing discontented with their situations.

Specifically, wage satisfaction hit its lowest level, at 54.8%, since November 2021, according to March data also from the New York Fed. At the same time, the average “reservation” wage, or the lowest salary acceptable to take a job, tumbled to $74,236, a slide of nearly 10% from the November 2024 peak.

There’s also the lingering concern over federal government layoffs as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashed the federal workforce since President Donald Trump took over in January. Announced federal layoffs thus far have totaled 281,452, according to consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

However, the actual toll could be well higher: Atlanta Fed researcher M. Melinda Pitts estimates that including related hits on contractors and grant employees, the total impact could be on the order of 1.2 million. Those cuts, though, won’t be fully felt until later in the year after government severance checks run out.

In the interim, the jobs numbers likely will indicate a slowing economy, though not one falling off a cliff.

Citigroup forecasts job growth of 105,000, which “is not spectacular but given the slowdown in immigration it may be around the rate of job growth required to keep the unemployment rate unchanged,” Citi economist Andrew Hollenhorst wrote.

In addition to the headline payrolls number, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release wage information, which will be watched closely for signs that inflation is slowing. The Wall Street consensus is that average hourly earnings rose 0.3% in April, good for a 3.9% increase year over year, or slightly higher than in March.

The report will be released at 8:30 a.m. ET.

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