Journalists and press freedom advocates were rightly appalled last month when a single judge in small-town Mississippi ordered one newspaper to remove one allegedly defamatory editorial from its website. But now, Florida’s legislature is pushing countless news outlets across the Sunshine State to do the same thing.
Florida’s Senate Bill 752 would amend the state’s retraction statute, which limits defamation damages if a news outlet publishes a correction or retraction, to also require outlets to permanently remove entire articles containing even a single alleged fallacy from websites they control. Outlets that fail to do so would also lose the right to assert crucial legal defenses.
