• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, May 7, 2025

Taking aim at social media companies, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey this week formally proposed regulating platforms' content moderation practices.

Specifically, Bailey put forward a potential rule that would require large tech platforms to allow Missouri residents to, in his office's words, “choose their own content moderators rather than being forced to rely on the biased algorithms of monopolistic tech giants.”

“Big Tech oligarchs have manipulated the content Missourians see online and silenced voices they don’t like,” Bailey stated this week when he unveiled the proposed regulation.

“I’m using every tool to ensure Missourians -- not Silicon Valley -- control what they see on social media,” he added.

His proposal would require tech companies to offer Missouri users a “choice screen” that would allow them “to choose among competing content moderators, if any competing content moderators have sought access to the platform.”

Bailey added that he plans to hold public forums in the near future, in order to gather evidence about what he calls “deceptive practices by social media companies.”

His proposal comes a few months after Federal Trade Commission chair Andrew Ferguson launched a separate investigation of tech platforms' editorial policies.

Like Bailey, Ferguson groused about social media companies' policies, writing on X (formerly Twitter) that an FTC investigation would mark “an important step forward in restoring free speech and making sure Americans no longer suffer under the tyranny of Big Tech -- PERMANENTLY.”

Despite the officials' statements, there's good reason to doubt that the FTC, Missouri or any other state or federal governmental body could pass content-moderation rules that would stand up in court. As recently as last year, the Supreme Court affirmed that social media platforms, like other publishers, have First Amendment rights to determine their own editorial policies.

The First Amendment “does not go on leave when social media are involved,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a ruling handed down last July.

“This Court has many times held, in many contexts, that it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression -- to 'un-bias' what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences,” she added. “That principle works for social-media platforms as it does for others.”