C_Clayton_Jones
Diamond Member
- Apr 28, 2011
- 77,293
- 37,293
The notion of ‘circumventing the First Amendment’ via censorship by private surrogate is devoid of legal merit because social media voluntarily edited their content absent government penalty or punishment.The implications of these documents becomes more serious once the Biden campaign became the Biden administration. These documents show a back channel existed with President Biden’s campaign officials, but those same back channels appear to have continued to be used by Biden administration officials. If so, that would be when Twitter may have gone from a campaign ally to a surrogate for state censorship. As I have previously written, the administration cannot censor critics and cannot use agents for that purpose under the First Amendment.
indeed, there is nothing in Frist Amendment case law that addresses ‘censorship by private surrogate’ because there is no First Amendment issue for any court to hear, again, because the state has not acted to limit or restrict speech thorough punitive measures, such as states suing social media because of how they edit their content, as we saw in the cited example of the un-Constitutional Florida law.