It’s been less than 24 hours since Elon Musk fulfilled his promise of releasing the internal memos regarding the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story on Twitter.
I won’t go into details about the whole affair as I know my readers are already well versed on this topic.
But what I want to add to the discussion is how the often-used justification for what Twitter did is not appropriate anymore after the latest evidence has come to light.
For the last several years when people complained of big-tech censorship, the rebuttal would often be that private companies can do whatever they want and are not bound by the First Amendment.
While true, there is an exception. The government cannot use third-party intermediaries to violate the constitutional rights of Americans. In the case of Twitter, this is a violation of the First Amendment, even though a private company did the censoring.
In the current Twitter document release, it appears to be proven that the government directed a private company to violate the First Amendment rights of several Americans, at least that we know of so far. There may be thousands more in other documents who had their posts banned at the behest of government officials as well.
What this means is that some of the highest ranking government officials in several different agencies violated the First Amendment rights of countless Americans. This violation now opens them up to billions in liability, most likely in the form of countless lawsuits.
This is not speculation. It is well known the government cannot act through private companies or third-parties to circumvent constitutional rights.
The Twitter files have now shown that’s exactly what happened. Not only did it happen, it was not a one-time event. Instead, it was an ongoing conspiracy to knowingly deny people of their First Amendment rights, complete with dedicated pipelines of communication dedicated to the task.
Prediction: Expect the lawsuits to start being filed as early as next week.
—
Thanks for reading: If you prefer, you can subscribe and follow our content on Substack. It’s free!
If you want to learn more about our site and what we do, click here.
Finally, if you enjoy this article please make sure to share it. It really helps.
SHARE