“It’s true that the First Amendment ordinarily applies to the government rather than private companies. But the central claim in Mr. Trump’s class-action lawsuit—that the defendants should be treated as state actors and are bound by the First Amendment when they engage in selective political censorship—has precedent to back it up. Their censorship constitutes state action because the government granted them immunity from legal liability, threatened to punish them if they allow disfavored speech, and colluded with them in choosing targets for censorship.
The high court has repeatedly held that federal immunity pre-empting state law can transform a private party’s conduct into state action subject to constitutional scrutiny.
A growing body of evidence suggests that social media companies have voluntarily worked with Democratic officials to censor content the latter disfavor. In Brentwood Academy v. Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association (2001), the high court held that state action exists if the private party’s conduct results from “significant encouragement, either overt or covert,” or if the private party is a “willful participant in joint activity with the State or its agents.”
Social-media companies are privately owned, but when they collude with officials to block disfavored content, they are serving as the government’s censorship bureau and must answer to the First Amendment.
But the case is unprecedented in another way—the staggering scale of Big Tech’s power to restrict speech. No company in U.S. history has so comprehensively silenced elected officials or prevented them from communicating with citizens. Worse, they did so at the behest of, and in careful coordination with, government leaders in the ascendant opposition party as it gained power.”
Imagine how big this can be if Trump indeed wins his case against Twitter and Facebook and therefore, suddenly, Twitter and Facebook are officialy ‘the governments censorship bureau’. No more bypassing the constitution for Big Tech!
I wonder how YouTube is gonna look like if they are no longer allowed to censor video’s with unwelcome opinion. Or Facebook for that matter. I wonder how long a platform can stand while fake news and conspiracy madness is eating away it’s soul, like maggots eating away the soft decomposing underbelly tissue of a corpse.
It could be the beginning of the end for Big Tech. And they had it coming.
