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Im on my way to a barbecue right now so dont have time to add much in the way of commentary but a federal has just hand down an injunction barring the white house from working with social media organizations to censor specific content. A rulling that the Washington Post describes as dangerous and violating long standing norms. Happy Fourth of July all ;-)
Any link to the actual injunction?(Here's a link from@ToaKraka: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/63290154/missouri-v-biden/, I think the injunction is https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520.294.0_5.pdfI'm interested in what concrete orders are given, and what that says about the final remedies. The article says:
Which is pretty spectacular, and raises it's own obvious First Amendment concerns.
The thing is, I could imagine a detailed statue that laid out what what government could and could not do in this regard, and creates offences for trying to censor the public. But I'm finding it harder to imagine what a judge could do about it from the bench, even if he sees a rock-solid case that the government is violating the Constitution.
The government doesn't have First Amendment rights. The First Amendment is a restriction on what the government (specifically, Congress) has authority to govern. In a sense, the government can't make regulations that prohibit its own employees from having First Amendment rights. But regulators working for the government, given authority by various acts of Congress, can't ask third parties to censor on their behalf (with the implied threat understood by all that regulators will regulate these social media companies if they don't comply).
(Besides, workplaces do have workplace rules about what can and can't be said all the time, and the government is a workplace like any other, you can't flash your dick in the White House Press room and keep your job, so I hope you can't also work for a White House task force and ask social media companies to ban you.)
Government speech is a whole explicit area of US jurisprudence which is probably over both our heads.
But however you categorise, an injunction preventing government agents from merely communicating with persons is a pretty big deal. But IMHO the judge go this right. The injunction is mostly a list of prohibitions like
[Youse fuckers are enjoined from]:
My emphasis. So he is allowing the Government to communicate, but just not for the constitutionally forbidden purpose. Sounds reasonable.
I have not read through the injunction carefully, so for the sake of argument I'll just accept your claim that it's over broad in various ways. If true, it should certainly be trimmed down to size.
My concern was whether any ruling made from the bench (whether as a temporary injunction or as final) could be structured in a reasonable way. And it seems to me that a list of prohibitions for various kinds of communication *for the [curtailment in some particular sense] of protected speech" is a good way to do it.
Do you think that legislation duly by Congress with similar content would meaningfully curtail the free speech and petition rights of the platforms?
Seems to me that such a law would be subject to strict-scrutiny, but would pass it with flying colours.
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