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Comment by Broken_Hippo | Hacker News Reader

Misunderstood by Americans as it isn't absolute (FB and Twitter can just take your stuff down) - and nonexistent outside of it.

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I'm not an American, so I wouldn't know.

The question was: How does it fit in? Because the government is involving itself in actions of censorship, even if it is one step removed.

Similar to how I can still be accused and convicted of a crime, if the only thing I did was facilitating it? I'm not a lawyer, but I hope I'm getting my point across here.

The First Amendment generally only applies to governments. If companies exert government powers--company towns are the canonical example here--it can apply to them, but only to the extent that they are exerting such powers. The other way you can get state action is if there is some degree of government coercion (essentially, you have to be unable to say "no" to a request).

There are some colorable arguments that the government has exerted such coercion over Twitter et al in recent years, but I have never seen a lawsuit alleging such a connection that properly made those arguments, as those people instead prefer to make cockamamie theories such as "§230 makes everybody state actors."

It's specifically talking about the government. In this case, it was the government doing the censorship so first amendment applies.

It's not the government doing the censorship if the private site can choose to refuse. In this case both were in cahoots, but that was (is?) Twitter's prerogative.

No, the government is requesting something to be taken down. Short of the exceptions mentioned up above, the platforms are not obligated whatsoever to follow those requests.

My understanding is that there is already court precedent that the government can’t do this (use private companies to do their censorship even if it’s not strictly guaranteed to happen).

There is, even if the companies can refuse. The government cannot ask companies to censor something. This is a direct violation of the first amendment.

News to me. What case established it?

I would be pretty surprised if this was true but 3rd Party Doctrine is in good standing in 99% of cases.

Edit: Yeah, it appears this is not true at all. The government of course cannot coerce a private company to do this (which is obvious since that'd be tantamount to the government itself doing the censorship), but they absolutely can request it. https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...

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