Social-media stocks have taken a beating this year, but it’s nothing compared with the smack-down their companies have recently received in court. “We reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared in its Sept. 16 decision upholding Texas’s anticensorship law.

The legal fight over whether states can restrict such behavior could soon be headed to the Supreme Court, as Florida last week appealed an 11th Circuit ruling that struck down its anticensorship law.