Judge says Education Dept partisan out-of-office emails violated First Amendment

“the First Amendment is a cheap thing if all it provides is the assurance that one may say what a current majority is willing to hear.” Charles Rembar

I think we can all agree on this. It would just be nice if there was consistent enthusiasm for the first amendment when it comes to actual taboo ideas. Are you quoting this when you hear about right wing extremists being canceled or jailed in Europe? In the 1970s, Jewish lawyers at the ACLU defended the American Nazi Party’s right to march in Skokie. Not out of support, but to uphold the principle of free speech for all. What happened to intellectual honesty?

> What happened to intellectual honesty?

It’s gone. The ACLU itself is pretty anti free speech these days and happily looks the other way when censorship on private social media platforms aligns with their ideological views. People have been writing about free speech issues at the ACLU for about a decade now:

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/is-the-aclu...

Come, come, my good sir! US citizens know that censorship on private social media platforms is NOT a First Amendment issue! While it may be censorship of a sort, it's not done by the US government, and therefor is allowable. This is middle school civics in the USA, old boy! There's nothing, nothing, in the US constitution that says anyone else must pay to promulgate your opinions. Freedom of speech is freedom of government suppression in the USA. But like almost everything else in the USA, it's up to you to pay for it.

It is a 1A issue when they are censoring due to government pressure

Not what I'm arguing, I agree with you. Nobody is compelled to carry your speech, with a rare "common carrier" exception. Which social media is not.

You've got me thinking. I'm sure there's government pressure on social media to not carry certain posts, or allow certain human access. That's a pretty clear 1st Amendment violation. But it shades off. What about say, NSA using it's total information awareness feed of the entire internet to let HN know when a terms-of-service violation happened. Is that OK? What about if the NSA selectively notifies Truth Social of TOS violations? What if the NSA sends an official lawyer around to Facebook to get them to modify TOS a particular way? What if the DoJ sends someone to Paul, Weiss to get them to send someone else around (pro bono!) to hint that modifying TOS a particular way would be beneficial to Bluesky? What if Zuckerberg calls up Trump and asks him how he'd like TOS to read? I'm not sure where the line is.