Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government (opens in new tab)

> A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens.

This is not how a preliminary injunction works.

The court has ordered that the governmment stop doing the in-dispute things until the dispute is resolved - in either direction - in court.

The standard for such an injunction is not proof, but "they might prevail in court, and there's potentially enough harm from letting it continue in the meantime".

"A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens."

They literally did not.

This is a preliminary injunction, not a decision on the merits.

This is why the court is clear they are allegations, etc.

There is a ton of issues with this injunction and rationale, and it will almost certainly be overturned (or at the very least,seriously modified) on appeal.

In fact, the injunction and reasoning even deliberately misquotes evidence to try to support points. Not like in arguable ways, either. While that sort of thing may be fun and play okay sometimes at the district level, and in the news, 99% of the time that goes very badly at appeals.

I strongly doubt when that happens that you will come back and say "i guess the government didn't do a bad thing"

(I read the entire decision, FWIW)

> Why defend them?

Because a depressingly large percentage of people would actually like to see the first amendment overturned.

It’s not so cut and dry, because believers in free speech can believe that the federal government and its employees should also be free to speak.

The legal theory at stake here is that all government speech is inherently coercive. But this is not necessarily true, or aligned with free speech as a principle of society.

Any time someone says “we must protect free speech by legally enjoining the following people from speaking,” I am suspicious.

> Freedom of speech is literally the first thing in the Bill of Rights.

Not necessarily talking about this injunction in particular, but I would like to address this argument. Yes, freedom of speech is very clearly expressed in the Constitution. But there are limits and exceptions to every right in the Constitution, certainly including speech.

There are many things that are indisputably "speech" and yet are also illegal: fraud, extortion, libel, slander, perjury, threats, impersonating a doctor or law enforcement officer, etc.

I think it would be difficult to make a case that our society would be better off if we defined free speech in so broad and absolutist a sense as to permit all of these. So our evaluation of any particular issue must be more complex than "it's speech, therefore it is always automatically okay."

> The government did a bad thing. Why defend them?

Talk about smuggling your conclusion into the premise.

Usually this happens due to political ideology. People will condone things that benefit their tribe.

To me, the problem is that the whole situation is rotten, and focusing on one tiny aspect while leaving out the wider context just makes a convenient scapegoat.

Even before centralizing websites entered pop culture, it was blatantly obvious that they are intrinsically subject to censorship, just like TV, radio, and newspapers. cf "The revolution will not be televised". It wasn't a matter of if, and it wasn't even a matter of when. They are defective by design, and most people just straight up didn't seem to care. Just like how they were happy to believe corporate news on other mediums for decades.

Furthermore, most of the power in this country resides outside the de facto government. The pattern of "this is bad for us. please take it down. <possible implied escalation>" is routine and banal. Focusing on a government agency doing this (which actually has much less soft power than say a major advertiser or a golf buddy), and blowing it out of proportion just feels like a distraction from the overall dynamic. "Look we found the censorship! This is what we need to fix!" - even though censorship is pervasive for any centralized media.

The Bill of Rights is not ranked by importance.

Did you read the article?

>The ruling was criticized by Jameel Jaffer, an adjunct professor of law and journalism who is executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. "It can't be that the government violates the First Amendment simply by engaging with the platforms about their content-moderation decisions and policies," Jaffer told The New York Times, calling it "a pretty radical proposition that isn't supported by the case law."

> While the government must be careful to avoid coercion in its efforts to combat false information, Jaffer said that "unfortunately, Judge Doughty's order doesn't reflect a serious effort to reconcile the competing principles."

> Stanford Law School Assistant Professor Evelyn Douek told The Washington Post that the "injunction is strikingly broad and clearly intended to chill any kind of contact between government actors and social media platforms."

I agree with you. Things like this:

> A February 2021 message in which Flaherty asked Twitter to remove a parody account related to Hunter Biden's daughter said, "Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately."

are just self-dealing. If I email Twitter with a request like that, they correctly route it to /dev/null. If the office of the President sends that, they can't do that. It's just too risky. So that's why I think it's an abuse of power.

In the absence of some court ruling that prohibits parody, you have the Constitutional right to pretend to be Hunter Biden's daughter on Twitter. Twitter also has the right to do some editorializing, like not giving them a checkmark, or posting a note like "we don't think this is actually Hunter Biden's daughter", or shutting down the account. It's their right, but they have to do it because they want to do it, not because the President of the United States said so. That's not a power that the President has.

While I personally agree with the causes the administration is fighting for, they are exercising powers that the government doesn't have. That should always be viewed critically. It sucks that people are getting bad information about vaccines. Increase funding for schools or get a Constitutional amendment passed that removes the freedom of speech. Threatening emails are easy, but an abuse of power. Follow the process you swore an oath to uphold, even if you don't get instant gratification. The 1st Amendment exists for a good reason, and we can't forget that.

> A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens.

I'm not sure you read the article you're quoting, because you're claiming stuff that does not correspond to the facts.

The article you're quoting states quite clearly that a judge granted a request for a preliminary injunction imposing limits on how a few state institutions can exercise their rights to fight disinformation.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...

This is a preliminary injunction. It loosely means "hey we have here a plaintiff that claims a few government institutions are doing something wrong. While we check if the plaintiff's complain holds any water, let's put a pin on these things."

The article you're quoting also states quite clearly that the US government has the right to fight disinformation, specially that which directly harms the public. This happens to be exactly the case.

This boils down to covid denialists and antivaxers in general trying to push their disinformation, and thus trying to stop state institutions such as the Department of Health from suggesting that, say, letting a pandemic spread freely through a population can get a lot of people killed.

> The government did a bad thing.

The filing is that there is sufficient probability the government did a bad thing to issue an injunction while the court figures out if the government did a bad thing. In general, injunctions protecting freedom of speech are broadly and freely issued.

... But a rational person can ask how we protect free speech by muzzling the government in this context.

The court clearly found that wrongly because they do say that there are other non first amendment protected speech that the government can indeed suppress on social media.

It’s just these few non first amendment protected items that the court is ideologically opposed to that the government cannot suppress.

Except if you look at the number of complaints that were actually acted on it looks a lot less like they were that intimidating at all. From the Twitter files it seems like way less than 10% of the reported tweets had anything happen to them at all.

It's integral for the executive office to be able to head off garbage information like that spewed by MAGAs and antivax people, no one forced twitter or facebook to censor that garbage, but they chose to. This judgement is garbage and the judge's decision will pretty quickly be vacated by the appellate court because the executive branch has been able to contact newspapers and other media since the beginning of the nation. It seems to me like this judge thinks that the judicial branch is the only "powerful" branch of the government these days, like the Supreme Court seems to think as well.

Read the entire injunction. It’s only seven pages. Then tell me with a straight face that you think it’s a good thing for free speech.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...

It amounts to “no one from these 8 government agencies may communicate with anyone working at these three non profits, 20 social media companies or any similar organization”

I’m not defending the behavior alleged here but this judge is not the sort of person you want adjudicating serious issues. You don’t fight censorship with blanket bans on speech.

A supporter of free speech should be horrified by this ruling. If you’re not, imagine an injunction of similar scope where the political sides were reversed.

The orange man is bad.

What I find of great concern is that the US used to have a strong dissident faction that was against government suppression of basic rights such as free speech.

Now, we have two cheerleading factions.

I feel the division in the country has stoked authoritarian sentiment on both sides as they desperately grasp for measures to suppress each other.

Now do this for everything. Don't allow the government to 'request' the information they have on you. You want information, get a warrant. The two must go together. Either it's coercion by the government to ask a corporation to do XZY or it's not.

The government wasn’t found to be suppressing information, it is just an injunction. The government claims to simply be engaging in dialog about areas they find concerning from a variety of angles including salient public health in a declared emergency, what is considered to be dangerous medical advice, participation in conspiracy and sedition, influence of elections, etc. The injunction, as the article describes, doesn’t prevent the agencies from engaging on a lot of these topics and the topic set is somewhat narrow. The government generally has been allowed to constrain speech that’s a clear danger or interferes with either the goals emergency operations or the safe conduct of emergency operations, as well as public health and safety. This has been upheld in case law and by the Supreme Court for over 200 years.

I’d note that a Trump appointed judge in Louisiana giving a preliminary injunction on something uniquely ideologically aligned by those dimensions and is noted in the article as out of step with precedent isn’t the end of the line.

It's an interesting discussion: should the government be able to ask private entities to take down content?

What if that content puts a family at risk?

What if the WH thinks it does, but it isn't obvious to a third party?

It's quite ironic that you're castigating commenters for not reading the article as you confidently proclaim false information that reading the article would remedy you of.

> A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens.

False. I think you should edit your comment to remove the false information or acknowledge that you are wrong.

Suddenly a Louisiana plant judge cares about the effects of the White House on free speech? If you need to make an announcement about fairness, it's in bad-faith if you ignore how it's 100% politically motivated maneuvers made-up by GOP thinktanks to neuter democrat power.

You betcha they'll ignore that law or destroy it once they're back.

Because the world just isn't that simple anymore.

100 years ago, I would totally agree that the govt stopping citizens from spreading false information would be a violation of the first amendment. But we now live in a world where the generation of misinformation is automated. Controlling communication on social media does not necessarily imply stifling the speech of a human.

It's very possible that we currently live with an internet where more than half of accounts represent entirely fabricated personas created specifically to generate malicious propaganda. And they know that if they can get a judge to defend their antics as "Free Speech" they will be free to manipulate the general population however they want.

I agree that we need to be careful about protecting free speech online, but if we act like every character that goes over a wire is protected speech, we are digging our own grave.

I was listening to Ray Dalio the other day and the thing that caught my attention was when he talked about the WWII era during the Nazi reign: he said that it's the centrists (people holding center and more reasonable views) are the ones that got hanged.

When society polarizes, it seems that people will stick blindly to their side. Maybe the rational behind that, is that a non-polarized side won't get you as many protections.

HN seems to be non-immune to that. Many people here would like to think that they are smarter than the rest. It does seem from the many discussions here that it's the same homunculus everywhere.

First off, I think all of us have learned the unfortunate downsides to a libertarian approach to free speech over the past 20 years. Any free speech purist would do well to remember what their legal recourse would be if somebody made elaborate false-allegations about you that harmed your career and marriage - we have many legal tools that protect us from harmful lies. It is not remarkable that there are people who believe in "free speech" but do not consider disinformation about more nebulous bodies that don't have standing for a lawsuit (eg defaming vaccines in general, epidemiology, democracy, ethnicity, climate science, trans people, etc) to be something that should fall under that protection, any more than threats or perjury fall under that protection.

Why is it actionable when you make dangerous public lies that hurt somebody's pocketbook, but not public health?

Secondly, the US constitution says "shall make no law". What law was made here? What legal action was taken? There wasn't even a threat of legal action.

Government workers should be free to contact private organizations and speak to them freely and make requests of them. "The government would like this content taken down for public good" is not making a law, it's making a request. It's making their opinion known, and government functionaries are allowed to have professional opinions. Something like "In my professional opinion as a public health worker, this content is dangerous advice that will get people killed, and in the interest of public safety it would be best if readers were protected from it." That is a reasonable thing for a government-employed professional to do and say.

That said, I think they crossed the line here when it became a demand instead of a request. When the government starts ordering people around instead of just making the public interest known, it can easily be argued there's implied threats there.

IANAL, but I'm assuming in the end that's where this will land during the appeals - that sweeping injunctions against various government bodies communicating with social media companies will be lifted, but the court will find against the government on this case.

The vast majority of people are only headline readers. They see the title and they go on insane tangents on the subject. Facebook is the worst by far.

In the same article see the section "Exceptions include voting misinformation" - does it really baffle you that people think public health is as important as elections?

I'm with you on this.

Something tells me the people here arguing that Flaherty wasn't coercive or threatening would be arguing just the opposite if this was the Trump administration.

Apparently it's about time for our collective citizenry to relearn some generational lessons from history, preferably not the hard way.

“Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump nominee…”

this was clearly not an abuse of power and the fact that you think so and appear to be the top comment is deeply concerning

Because freedom of speech isn't absolute, and whether "the government did a bad thing" is the very question being asked, to which reasonable people may disagree.

With over a million COVID deaths in the US, there's a very valid question to be raised as to when emergency public health requirements take precedence over a right to spread misinformation/disinformation.

Freedom of speech isn't of much use when you're dead.

I'm not arguing which side was right, but I am saying it shouldn't baffle anyone, because it's a complex question with real tradeoffs on both sides. It's not simple black-and-white in the way you're presenting it.

Because the judge was wrong and he actually limiting free speech. The whitehouse should ignore the ruling.

Freedom of speech shouldn't be freedom of hate speech.

Because its okay when their side does it. Human nature at it's worst.

Same reason counties fall to communism. Free speech and open debate get in the way of bureaucrats trying to control peoples lives.

Example. There is a highly experimental vaccine, which is really gene therapy. People are questioning it. Including Mark Zuckerberg, who told all those people not to take it.

But then censored anyone online that wanted to have a discussion about it.

People are reporting severe injuries “including my own wife!” let’s block and ban them too. Big Pharmacy’s got millions to make.

Oh cheap already available treatments seem to work? Let’s ban discussion about those those too. No one can know that possible alternatives exist.

Courts say a whole lot of things.

The large majority of what the government is alleged to have done sounds entirely appropriate to me. The CDC, Surgeon General, and NIAID are responsible for publishing health guidance. This means they will say some things are true and some things are false. They have no power to censor third-party sources and I don't see evidence of even informal pressure. Yet third parties believed this information and used it to determine what posts are true, which sounds to me like these agencies did their job by publishing trustworthy guidance.

Some of the things this court said were factually incorrect. For instance,

>Dr. Francis Collins, in an email to Dr. Fauci told Fauci there needed to be a “quick and devastating take down” of the GBD—the result was exactly that

Yet in context, you find that the "take down" in question was a published rebuttal, not censorship. This is a lie, plain and simple.

> The FBI’s failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation, is particularly troubling.

The "story" is that Hunter Biden owned a laptop. The "Hunter Biden laptop story" was very much fake. None of the supposed evidence of corruption existed.

Worth noting that this is a something of a misrepresentation of Flaherty's email[0] by the judge. Flaherty said

> All, especially given the Journal's reporting on your internal work on political violence spurred by Facebook groups, I am also curious about the new rules as part of the "overhaul."

Referring to this[1] WSJ article that details explicit calls to violence on FB. He then specifically quotes part of FB's response in his question

> I am seeing that you will no longer promote civic and health related groups, but I am wondering if the reforms here extend further?

So Flaherty was absolutely not accusing Facebook "of causing 'political violence' by failing to censor false COVID-19 claims", he was accusing FB of hosting actual calls to violence.

[0]https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/63290154/174/1/missouri...

[1]https://archive.is/6q67O

But Flaherty specifically didn’t get what he wanted (that’s why he was mad!) so I think it’s misleading to say the power only goes from government to Facebook. If anything this example shows the exact opposite with Flaherty sending indignant anger in the other direction.

which direction are you imagining?

the one originating from the dude who used a swear word?

or the one originating from the company who felt comfortable ignoring the dude and the request?

after all, anyone can feel comfortable demanding anything, what matters is what they get:

e.g. TFG felt comfortable demanding that his political rivals be imprisoned, did he get it?

> “… I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today."

I think I would drive to the airport, go through security, and fly to DC just to throw a drink in that dumbass’s face and laugh.

Now imagine if the same words were used by the trump admin personnel! Left media would scream words like bullying. This gives complete justification and vindication of how the trump admin behaved! Untouchable.

This country is officially over.

Engineers having poor legal analysis seems to stem from a common assumption that lawyers are the programmers, the law is the code, and the judge is the interpreter/compiler who just sort of runs the arguments the lawyers provide and outputs an answer. This leads them to over-weight “rules lawyering” and creative interpretations. It can be fixed by instead viewing lawyers as junior devs making competing PRs and the judge as the senior dev reviewing and approving/denying them: if you find a clever loophole that inverts the law , the judge will say “that is not intended, denied”.

This new crop of politicians in robes seem to be worse than the rest. I’d expect this kind of malpractice from Fox News Channel, not the federal judiciary.

> a nationwide injunction restricting the government from nearly all contact with various companies and nonprofits.

Good thing that such an injunction was not issued.

Given all the emphasis you place on paraphrasing things correctly, this seems to be a pretty egregious misrepresentation of the injunction.

The ACLU has become a run-of-the-mill left wing org.

For proper 1st amendment protection, you should look at FIRE. Like the EFF, they are willing do defend that which they find objectionable - the ACLU no longer does.

People shouldn't be allowed to speak their piece when that piece can be bright-line traced to people dying.

But fine, let's allow people to speak their piece because bright lines are hard to draw, starting with Twitter, who should be completely free to follow or not follow what the US government says, which is literally what happened here.

This will be overturned on appeal, because the bar for this kind of order is way higher than where the Biden admin was, and for the most part we still care about being consistent when applying the rule of law.

> Society as a whole needs to be better at calling out the lies with hard facts and data.

It doesn’t work. In the time it takes to refute one lie with facts and data, the world has moved on and uncountable additional lies have been spread in the meantime.

Besides which. Both the people that produce the lies, and their supporters, are well aware of the fact that it’s not true. They just choose to ignore that. And any facts and data you are able to compile, will fall on deaf ears.

> We need more people to speak up when those speaking the loudest are wrong, uneducated, and unqualified to speak on the topic they’re preaching.

How, though? It takes a lot more work to develop an educated opinion than an uneducated one. There will always be more educated speakers than uneducated speakers. And do you really think that, during a pandemic, the best use of an epidemiologist's time is wading into the trenches and fighting every single case of "wrong on the internet"?

This'll come out in discovery, but I didn't see anything particularly crazy in the complaint.

I didn't see any examples of economic posts at issue, despite it being in the summary.

And the parody accounts seemed to be focused either on (1) non-public figures, like Biden's granddaughter or (2) have resulted in sincere confusion, such as when Twitter actually asked the CDC if a 'parody' account was Fauci's real handle.

Yelling fire in a crowded theatre is only illegal when you know for sure there is no fire and are intentionally trying to cause panic and death.

You mean misinformation like the Hunter laptop story, the Wuhan lab origin - both censored and true - or do you mean Russia gate (throughly discredited, but shoved down the electorate's throat for four years?

The judgement itself is worth reading; it is not nearly as polemical as it being made out to be. It goes into detail on the question of how the states of Missouri and Louisiana have standing here; the “letter of the law” answer is that there is extensive precedent for determining whether states have standing in cases like this and the judge determined this case clearly passes the tests set by those precedents, while the “spirit of the law” answer (also given in the ruling) is that millions of citizens of Missouri and Louisiana have had their constitutional rights (both state and federal) interfered with by the plaintiffs, and as states are charged with upholding their citizens’ rights, they have standing to seek injunctions to protect those rights.

> I don't understand how Missouri and Louisiana have any standing here.

Did you read their legal complaint? It doesn't feel like your statements here are responding to their claims about standing in the complaint.

The link you’ve provided does not back up the assertion you’ve made.

> Twitter, along with Facebook, implemented measures to block its users from sharing links to the story, and Twitter further imposed a temporary lock on the accounts of the New York Post and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, citing violations of its rules against posting hacked content. The Washington Post reported that this was a result of the company's scenario-planning exercises to combat disinformation campaigns

> Musk tweeted that Twitter had acted "under orders from the government", though Taibbi reported that he found no evidence of government involvement in the laptop story,

From that exact Wiki article:

> Musk tweeted that Twitter had acted "under orders from the government", though Taibbi reported that he found no evidence of government involvement in the laptop story, tweeting, "Although several sources recalled hearing about a 'general' warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there's no evidence—that I've seen—of any government involvement in the laptop story."[22][27] His reporting seemed to undermine a key narrative promoted by Musk and Republicans that the FBI pressured social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop stories.[22][36]

It was stolen revenge-porn of the President's son. Come on, do you remember how bad "The Fappening" went for Reddit? How Hulk Hogan's stolen sex tape went for Gawker? Twitter didn't need FBI to tell them that they didn't want Hunter Biden's cock all over their site.

What do you think the FBI's goal was with that behavior?

People can most certainly believe in a collective moral code that is, at times, at odds with the laws of their country, and simultaneously not dictated by a central religious authority.

Desiring the state to more closely model one's personal moral code isn't a signifier that people are placing the state at the "moral center", it's an indicator that they want those with a monopoly on violence to act in accord with what they believe is right.

I do believe the collective moral codes are drifting from those dictated by religions, but I hardly think that is a bad thing, given the rigidity and absolutism of many religions.

i think this is a strong point, and it's underscored by how little anyone is willing to center the discussion on something quite fundamental: is the behavior from the individuals in question acceptable even if it were legal? My answer to that is no, it is not and could not be acceptable human activity even if the laws protected it.

We've largely lost the ability to talk about the things themselves, preferring instead to look at things through the tremendously artificial lens of "what do the lawyers say?"

We've outsourced morality to a technocracy.

Historically, religion doesn't have a great track record with its use of moral authority.

If "secular governance" includes mega corporations I'd fully agree.

Social media is just the latest of them. For example, relatively traditional companies like credit card companies have disproportionate power in deciding whether transactions are allowed or not, regardless whether they're legal. Often they refuse to process transactions for industries apparently out of "moral" reasons.

Governments are actually becoming less influential because laws don't reach beyond their borders. Yet multinational companies often have monopolistic power and influence over many important aspects of people's lives.

This is survivorship bias, literally. Religion displays a seemingly higher cohesiveness of a moral and ethical philosophy partly because many who disagreed were actually killed. In more modern times they are merely excommunicated, shunned. Now that we can't just kill our political dissidents, we are left with less cohesion.

I am currently reading The Brothers Karamazov and recorded a couple quotes from the chapter I'm currently in (Book V: Pro and Contra, Chapter 5: The Grand Inquisitor) about freedom and religion, which seem too poignant to pass up right now. Not that I think religion is the answer to the problem. Here's one of my favorites:

"So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it...what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and all of humanity from the beginning of time."

This just tells me that there is no solution to this foible of human nature and that we are doomed to a future of dissatisfaction, and we'll invent endless ways to keep fighting.

I'm not saying we should do nothing. I'm just so tired, it seems so obvious, yet the path is not clear at all.

Interesting point, and one that's difficult to dispute. Belief in the supernatural or divine is baked into human nature. There's significant research showing that human capacity for faith is genetic. So, as we're building a secular society, it's worth asking: what happens to that need for the divine? Failing to account for basic human nature drove vast amounts of suffering in the 20th century, I fear that making a similar mistake will do the same.

Make no mistake: the old arbiters of morality can also fail spectacularly. Christendom did centuries of crusades with no better justification than "Our god says that land is ours."

The problem is the challenge of scalable applied philosophy. What name we affix to that challenge is less relevant than the challenge itself.

Yes, trying to have a "secular state" just means that traditional religions are going to be replaced by something that doesn't read as such, like "human rights", "liberal democracy" which we are happy to spread by the sword with disastrous consequences (afghanistan, iraq etc), DEI, ESG...

To points 1 and 2 this particular judge, amongst others, has been known to issue overly broad injunctions that reek of political bias.

The injunction is almost more the point of these cases.

If someone goes forum shopping, they have a decent chance of shutting down whatever Democratic policy they want until the injunction can be appealed. Or worse, a narrow injunction can conflict with a national injunction, which puts an administration in the position of choosing which binding injunction to follow. This recently occurred with an abortion drug [0].

[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/07/1159220452/abortion-pill-drug...

If this a jury trial, or will the same judge makes the final trial ruling?

The cited behavior is egregious, with Flaherty issuing orders and requesting specific takedowns, and doing so in an unprofessional and threatening manner that shows he is unfit for office. It's clear overreach beyond broadcasting the Executive's concerns about public health and requesting that companies do their part to help.

The injunction may go too far in the other direction (but it is temporary), in the final ruling maybe less limiting to the Administration, but behavior like Flaherty's should be reined in.

The courts have historically taken a dim view of the government's "chilling of free speech."

> Him being a trump nominee makes me suspicious, but also sad that that is the effect and that papers need to list who nominated a judge.

They don't, they just choose to do so. It's the same way pundits, authors, and broadcasters often get labeled "right-wing" or "conservative" while similarly left-wing ones don't get labeled. It's an editorial choice to call the reader's attention to it and imply relevance.

Beyond that, I think this is unique relative to the normal "bully pulpit" pressure in that:

* It's being used in order to suppress speech and opposition to the administration's policies, and

* It was being done in secret, not exposed until later, and has otherwise shown no signs of stopping

That makes it a bit different from, say, publicly pressuring lawmakers to reduce tariffs on sugar.

4. Which movies were censored, by whom?

5. That's clearly the Legislature's job. The Legislature is not the Executive. They make new law, not apply existing law.

> sad that that is the effect and that papers need to list who nominated a judge.

It matters because Trump appointed, and the GOP Senate confirmed, a batch of federal judges who the bar association determined were Not Qualified, because they were found to be lacking in "integrity, professional competence or judicial temperament."

The past two GOP presidents have eschewed bar association recommendations entirely and instead had their judicial appointments selected by the right-wing Federalist Society.

I’m definitely not a fan of Trump and I was also suspicious. But after reading the article, I don’t see anything objectionable with it especially with the carve outs.

But censorship pressure very much happened on “both sides”.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-tru...

> 1. Him being a trump nominee makes me suspicious, but also sad that that is the effect and that papers need to list who nominated a judge.

See for example another nominee:

> On December 1, the Eleventh Circuit ordered the case to be dismissed because Cannon "improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction" over it.[64][65][66][67][68] The Eleventh Circuit stated that Trump needed to show that the case met all four criteria under the Richey test for equitable jurisdiction over lawsuits for seized materials, but failed to do so for any criteria.[69][70][71] The Eleventh Circuit found that under Cannon, "the district court stepped in with its own reasoning" multiple times to argue in favor of Trump, sometimes even taking positions that Trump would not argue before the appeals court.[72][73][74] The Eleventh Circuit also found that when Trump did not explain what materials he still needed returned, or why, the "district court was undeterred by this lack of information".[69][75][76]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileen_Cannon#Trump_v._United_...

The panel that over-ruled Cannon were also majority-Trump nominees:

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/22/thorough-...

* https://archive.fo/aR3KZ

So it may be 'just' that particular judges are incompetent (which you would hope would be discovered in some kind of vetting process).

When Trump complained about “Obama judges” he was rightly ridiculed. Why is ok to cast aspersions on judges nominated by Trump?

Given Apple and Google have the ability to record every word you say(maybe not store it for 300M people, but they can certainly filter it for specific words that could begin recording once triggered... "Hey Google/Siri/Alexa/Cortana"), the issue is that we don't want the US government doing it, but private companies can? Heck if you buy any IOT device with a mic, you should give up any idea you have privacy.

I'm over this illusion of privacy.

If you are asking if we should spend less on spying, sure, but that could be my ignorant teens when I was an anarchist talking.

I'd rather the platforms be treated as common carriers - unable to censor by themselves. Corporations having the right to censor is no better than the government. It would fix a lot of misalignment in terms of advertiser spend, too.

In a common carrier world, the government censoring private individuals would go against our first amendment rights. Pretty clear cut.

Ideally we eventually reach p2p social networking protocols. I don't want my interest or attention graph dictated or influenced by a third party. I want to be able to (de)weight and (de)prioritize based off of my own personal preferences.

The Supreme Court said in Norwood v. Harrison (1973):

Racial discrimination in state-operated schools is barred by the Constitution and "[i]t is also axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish." Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, 267 F. Supp. 458, 475-476 (MD Ala. 1967).

Its not Big Tech thats getting sued, its the executive branch of the government.

Big Tech did its bro-thing and they're cool - they're getting away with it.

The WH, however, cannot do what they did and they're getting hammered for it.

Which is why they were swiftly cut down when they ignored these requests.

Oh wait.

It's a myth that it's illegal to yell fire in a crowded theatre, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

The “fire in a crowded theater” metaphor, in addition to being more a legal myth than a legal principle, is not quite the right perspective to understand this ruling. That said, if we try to use that metaphor to understand this ruling, it is sort of like “a judge has ruled that the federal firefighting organization is no longer allowed to pressure movie theaters to bar entry to moviegoers whom the firefighters suspect will shout fire in the theater”. In this metaphor, the bulk of the ruling is an extensive documentation of the many instances of firefighters and government organizations with names like “Conflagration Interdiction Committee” sending names of specific people to major theaters with comments like “this person regularly posts charts of the flammability of upholstery, do something about it” and then that person gets barred from that theater days later.

There's a really fun, and deeply relevant, historical tidbit on the history of 'yelling fire in a crowded theater.' That statement didn't actually come from any court case along those lines. Instead it was first used by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the case Schenck vs the United States, as a metaphor. [1]

So, what was the egregious offense, endangering all of society by words alone, uttered by by Schenck? This "yelling fire in a crowded theater"? Charles Schenck was a member of the local Socialist party, and was distributing fliers urging draft age men to oppose the draft (for World War 1) on the grounds that it entailed involuntary servitude, outlawed by the 13th amendment.

So there's your "yelling fire in a crowded theater" when you concede your right of free speech to the government.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

Always could. Because everyone else can see if the theater is on fire or not.

Fire Fire Fire!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDap-K6GmL0

Who gets to decide what information is "disinformation" and what is the right information?

Any view that you do not approve of is not disinformation.

Also, you are smart enough to recognize disinformation.. but you think everyone else around you is too gullible and would fall prey to "disinformation"

There's an argument that some pieces of the disinformation has some truth to it and thus not being able to say it cause more harm then censoring it. (So which side actually is analogous to yelling fire, the censorship side or the non censorship side.)

Content from .gov sites was labeled disinformation. One could consider the censorship at the time an act of disinformation. Remember the lab leak? Fauci with his smug smile behind Trump knowing full well the NIH sponsored gain-of-function research on Coronavirues in Wuhan of all places. Now that the dust has settled it's no longer a conspiracy theory but the most likely origin. CNN claims them not covering it at the time was "because Trump".

What is even disinformation in this climate other than a comfort blanket for those unable to form an actual argument?