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On America’s birthday, yet another front in the culture war opened over the meaning of free speech. The provocation? On July 4, a federal court ordered Joe Biden’s White House and a bevy of federal agencies and officials not to pressure social media platforms to delete or suppress broad categories of information, including posts on the pandemic, the 2020 election, and Hunter Biden’s laptop. Initial reporting on Judge Terry A. Doughty’s 155-page opinion in Missouri v. Biden<\/em> reflected our polarized times. The Washington Post labeled the decision a “win for the political right” while The New York Times called it “a victory for Republicans.” The headline for the Post story placed quotation marks around the word censorship<\/em>. But shouldn’t this just be considered a win for the First Amendment and not a partisan matter? After all, most of us should be able to agree it’s a bad idea for government officials to huddle in back rooms with corporate honchos to decide which social media posts are “truthful” or “good” while insisting, Wizard of Oz\u2013style, “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” The constitutional principle involved is straightforward. As Judge Richard Posner explained in Backpage.com, LLC v. Dart<\/em><\/a>, a government official who “threatens to employ coercive state power to stifle protected speech violates a plaintiff’s First Amendment rights, regardless of whether the threatened punishment comes in the form of the use (or, misuse) of the defendant’s direct regulatory or decisionmaking authority\u2026or in some less-direct form.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Assuming it is upheld on appeal, as it should be, it will limit the ability of future administrations to engage in behind-the-scenes censorship. And that is true whether the administration is led by Biden, Trump, or someone else<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n this topic was in July 2023 <\/p>\n\n\n\n still in research to see if that was the end point or there was mores steps<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A win for the First Amendment, and a loss for partisans who want to weaponize censorship […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":393,"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions\/393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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