{"id":5044,"date":"2021-07-12T23:49:31","date_gmt":"2021-07-12T23:49:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=5044"},"modified":"2021-07-12T23:49:31","modified_gmt":"2021-07-12T23:49:31","slug":"trump-can-win-his-case-against-tech-giants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/12\/trump-can-win-his-case-against-tech-giants\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Can Win His Case Against Tech Giants"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a really interesting argument:<\/p>\n

The media has panned Donald Trump\u2019s First Amendment lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube: \u201csure to fail,\u201d \u201cas stupid as you\u2019d think,\u201d \u201cridiculous.\u201d Mr. Trump\u2019s complaint omits important precedents, facts and claims for relief, but there\u2019s a strong case to be made that social-media censorship violates the Constitution. If his lawyers do better in court than in their initial filing, Mr. Trump can win.<\/p>\n

\n

It\u2019s true that the First Amendment ordinarily applies to the government rather than private companies. But the central claim in Mr. Trump\u2019s class-action lawsuit\u2014that the defendants should be treated as state actors and are bound by the First Amendment when they engage in selective political censorship\u2014has 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.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison<\/em> (1973) that the government \u201cmay not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.\u201d As Jed Rubenfeld and I argued<\/a> in these pages in January, that\u2019s what Congress did by passing Section 230(c)(2) of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech and immunizes them from state liability if they do so.<\/p>\n

The high court has repeatedly held that federal immunity pre-empting state law can transform a private party\u2019s conduct into state action subject to constitutional scrutiny. In Railway Employees\u2019 Department v. Hanson<\/em> (1956), the justices found state action in union-employer agreements because Congress had passed a statute immunizing such agreements from liability under state law. In Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association<\/em> (1989), the court again found state action in a private company\u2019s conduct because federal laws immunized companies from liability if they tested employees for drugs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Prominent congressional Democrats have also issued severe, explicit and repeated threats to retaliate against social-media giants if they fail to remove \u201chate speech\u201d and \u201cmisinformation\u201d that the government can\u2019t directly censor under the Constitution. These threats have worked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Opinion | Trump Can Win His Case Against Tech Giants<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a really interesting argument: The media has panned Donald Trump\u2019s First Amendment lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube: \u201csure to fail,\u201d \u201cas stupid as you\u2019d think,\u201d \u201cridiculous.\u201d Mr. Trump\u2019s complaint omits important precedents, facts and claims for relief, but there\u2019s a strong case to be made that social-media censorship violates the Constitution. If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-1jm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5044"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5045,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5044\/revisions\/5045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}