In a case that could foreshadow a disastrous outcome for conservatives efforts to handcuff social media companies’ autonomy, a federal appeals court upheld a lower court’s ruling the blocked Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s law that would have blocked the platforms’ ability to police the content users post, Yahoo reports.

“We hold that it is substantially likely that social-media companies—even the biggest ones—are ‘private actors’ whose rights the First Amendment protects, that their so-called ‘content-moderation’ decisions constitute protected exercises of editorial judgment, and that the provisions of the new Florida law that restrict large platforms’ ability to engage in content moderation unconstitutionally burden that prerogative,” the opinion reads.

DeSantis pushed the Republican-dominated Florida legislature to pass the law, whining that conservatives were being unfairly blocked from popular social media platforms in a violation of their First Amendment rights.  However, individuals aren’t banned from sites because of their political views; according to the terms of services of various platforms, they were suspended or banned for violent or threatening content or other issues such as misinformation about the coronavirus or the 2020 election.

Republicans complain that they’re being targeted unfairly for posting on sites like Facebook and Twitter things that call for violence against people with whom they disagree, claiming they’re invoking “free speech” to make such statements.  The First Amendment does not protect threats.  In fact, the First Amendment only protects people from government censorship, not determinations from private companies enforcing their terms of service to prevent disinformation and threatening language.