Whatever your opinion on the wisdom or tyranny of government trying to control "misinformation" on private social media platforms, the above line shows the absolute ignorance of the judge.
Alien and Sedition Acts, Abrams v. United States come to mind.
The case is about government officials requesting content moderation and about private companies utilizing their First Amendment rights, at times to deny with government requests and at times to comply with government requests.
The government’s right to request content moderation is extremely, extremely well-established in the US. Private companies’ right — in almost all cases — to decline those requests is well established. Companies’ right not to be harassed by excessive requests or coerced by threat (implicit or explicit) is also well established.
This case is just making the argument that if a government requests action or brings a platform’s attention to some content, if the platform agrees with their request, acting on that request or notice would violate First Amendment rights of the people who posted the content.
>This case is just making the argument that if a government requests action or brings a platform’s attention to some content, if the platform agrees with their request, acting on that request or notice would violate First Amendment rights of the people who posted the content.
The case is making the argument that the government crossed a line from "request" to "coercion" or "coordination", and that there should be limits on the latter. Overall this case is a good Rorschach test, because if you switched out the content for something more amenable a lot of people would immediately switch sides on this issue.
If the platforms disagreed with the request and complied with it anyway: coercion (and the platforms themselves don't even have to claim they were coerced!)
So what this resolves to is: platforms cannot concur with a request or notice made by the government.
Not analogous to the internet at all?