First Amendment scholars and free speech advocates say the sweeping nature of the ruling is too broad and hobbled by a partisan agenda, Zeeshan Aleem writes.
But winning that argument requires evidence that the government was not just asking for content to be removed but applying pressure toward that end. And while it’s inherently tricky to determine where asking ends and pressuring begins when you're talking about an entity as powerful as the government, experts say the plaintiffs don’t back up their claim that the government exerted pressure.
In their scathing critique of Doughty’s ruling, Leah Litman of the University of Michigan and Lawrence Tribe of Harvard Universityof governments asking private parties about their content moderation policies or discussing whether foreign governments are interfering with content in order to alter elections. “The First Amendment certainly doesn’t prevent them from merely asking,” they write.
and didn't involve difficult questions, this ruling didn’t grapple with those difficult questions. Instead it “fails to distinguish” between public criticism, sharing information about rules violators, and private messages pressuring a company to take down specific content. “These diff[erent] acts raise very diff[erent] constitutional Qs. But you would never know it if you read Tuesday’s opinion,” she tweeted.
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