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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   30475 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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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]:

emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;

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.

Suppose there were bands of brown-shirted (and presumably red hatted) thugs who were reputed to go around murdering enemies of the president. Obviously already illegal, no need for a new law.

Suppose members of the FBI etc occasionally met with the leadership of these gangs and there are transcripts saying how the feds mentioned that so-and-so is not a nice guy (but never actually asking for a hit of course). Then suppose there's a pattern of so-and-so's getting murdered by "unknown assailants".

Do you seriously think it would be unconstitutional for Congress to pass a law banning those meetings?

Yes, it would be unconstitutional to ban such meetings, not least because you can't rigorously define "such meetings".

The proper response within channels would be to indict the FBI agents on conspiracy to commit murder. That's weaksauce, though, because if such a situation were actually happening, the law has become a polite fiction.

You could forbid meeting with, say, armed organizations for the purpose of conspiring to kill people. This is of course, already illegal, no one seems to have a constitutional problem with that.

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