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-> Government workers should be free to contact private organizations and speak to them freely and make requests of them. "The government would like this content taken down for public good" is not making a law, it's making a request. It's making their opinion known, and government functionaries are allowed to have professional opinions. Something like "In my professional opinion as a public health worker, this content is dangerous advice that will get people killed, and in the interest of public safety it would be best if readers were protected from it." That is a reasonable thing for a government-employed professional to do and say.

A fair point, and I don't disagree at all with this. I only wish to share with you my opinion as a fellow citizen:

I'd just as much prefer to use a social media platform that doesn't bend the knee to the government. Let the people decide for themselves what is useful information or not. We live in a representative democracy - this form of government is itself a safeguard against an ill-informed populace.

Tangentially, not a small part of the problem may be the government's proclivity to lie to the people. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me..."

EDIT: It might be a useful exercise to consider /why/ we are interested in the freedom of speech issue at a foundational level. I think that due to the speed of modern communication, in a crisis like COVID-19 where people are debating what /must/ be done and there are disagreements, we find that the common road is a hard one to walk and we run out of ways to rationalize a compromise. Maybe this leads us to want a fast fix, limit personal responsibilities so the government has the space to make things nice again.

If you're down voting at least be kind enough to tell me what you take issue with. I won't bite

I didn’t downvote but was tempted.

> I'd just as much prefer to use a social media platform that doesn't bend the knee to the government. Let the people decide for themselves what is useful information or not. We live in a representative democracy - this form of government is itself a safeguard against an ill-informed populace.

Over the past decade or two with social media we have increasingly seen people are NOT good at deciding what information is useful. A large percentage of the population believes wild folklore, conspiracy theories, etc. We used to live in a truth based society (with occasional issues when lies were presented as truth). We now have a post-truth society where alternative facts are invented at will and displace reality. Worse many of the peddlers of misinformation are just not harmlessly misinformed but know they are lying.

In times of extreme crisis, we do need a quick fix. There simply isn’t time to waste placating people who think injecting bleach will protect them from an airborne illness in a pandemic. We could have spent a decade giving everyone a Master’s in Microbiology and Epidemiology and still not convinced antivaxxers, because they aren’t swayed by facts but by beliefs that feel truthy to them.

The entire point of representative democracy is to avoid the pitfalls of direct democracy which prevents expert analysis and decisions. Modern society is complex enough it has to be guided by subject matter experts. Can you imagine if the simple majority of users of your software got to decide every product decision from now on? Or worse, you had to get approval from the 5% of users that are mad the app doesn’t display Sasquatch’s location?

Personal responsibility has never alone been adequate to deal with the externalities government is uniquely able to fix - war, natural disaster, famine, and pandemics. Collective action is required for these challenges (and more mundane ones like pollution and other externalities). Any society has to be able to balance between the rights of individuals such that a tiny vocal minority can’t overly endanger the continued existence of society. Doing that well, so that nobody is run roughshod over and everyone gets a voice is important. But in extremis we don’t care to compromise with people who are endangering the herd. Humans never have had much tolerance for that.

I say all this knowing authoritarian governments are often able to do their worst abuse in times of crisis. But politely asking Facebook to take down or spread-limit some misinformation that statistically will lead to death isn’t tyranny.

Well reasoned point, I think we disagree at a temperamental level.

> Any free speech purist would do well to remember what their legal recourse would be if somebody made elaborate false-allegations about you that harmed your career and marriage

This is a total straw man. Free speech absolutists almost universally acknowledge that fraud, defamation, libel, and narrowly defined incitement are special cases that don't qualify for protection.

With respect to "disinformation", I would challenge you to come up with a strict definition and a framework for applying that designation and see how you might feel about giving that tool to your political opponents.

Quite incorrect. Defamation is a tort, not a crime. It's legal.

Criminal defamation laws in the US have been repeatedly struck down as unconstitutional, not by absolutists but by lots of normal working judges.

I'm quite aware of that, and you'll notice if you read my comment again that I specifically said "are special cases that don't qualify for protection", not that they should be a crime. Civil cases are actually a great way to address defamation.

That's the thing, though - they are still "protected speech" under 1A. That's why laws banning it get struck down.

If you're going to lawyer every word here, I'll be more precise. I mean immune from legal redress, not "protected" per 1a. Dealing with defamation via civil suit is perfectly consistent with a free speech absolutist position, which is my original point.

This is an incredibly tedious exchange, it seems like you're going to pains to find the least charitable interpretation of what I'm saying.

There was 100%, clear, and explicit threat of legal action:

https://twitter.com/AGAndrewBailey/status/167664657087005491...

You should read the order before you comment on something like this.

Okay, let’s dig into that one. The tweet quotes the court ruling, which says “Psaki publicly reminded Facebook and other social-media platforms of the threat of ‘legal consequences’ if they do not censor misinformation more aggressively.”

But that quote isn’t accurate. The second direct quote in the ruling is there; “legal consequences” is not[1].

I read the whole thing. I don’t think she came close to threatening legal action at any point. So what are we to make of this? I can’t come to any conclusion other than that the judge’s political bias led him to be sloppy about the evidence and misquote government officials in order to bolster his case.

1: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...

Being a government employee carries a threat with it. I don't want those people making 'requests' to suppress others points of view in any situation, that's not reasonable to me at all. I'd rather they have their own press conference or whatever and counter whatever it is they disagree with and let me decide who I want to trust.

I don't trust anyone to decide what is misinformation or disinformation - that's also something I want to decide for myself.