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Comment by dankebitte | Hacker News Reader

> This is why the Biden administration had a restraining order filed against it, on account of them pressuring social media companies to ban content it didn't like. This violated the First Amendment

It's very strange of you to leave out that the extremely right-wing 5th Circuit's opinion was overturned 6-3 by SCOTUS because "pressuring social media companies to ban content" was a complete fabrication the plaintiffs failed to support whatsoever.

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Regardless of the subsequent lifting of the order, it still illustrates that the government cannot make private parties carry out illegal acts on its behalf. If anything, the fact that the circuit's decision was later overturned shows that the courts are erring on the side of restraining the government when they try to make third parties carry out actions that the government cannot do legally.

It's simply bizarre to claim that a blatantly partisan circuit court issuing capricious restrictions on their political opposition and having them vacated by SCOTUS is evidence of "the courts" erring against "the government" generally. The decision was overturned because the plaintiffs' case was a baseless fiction that the Biden administration was ever even implicitly compelling those third parties to do anything. The plaintiffs' standing was so plainly nonexistent that even 3/6 of the majority from Kennedy v. Bremerton School District couldn't pretend there was a case. The only example that case serves is of the most Republican-allied circuit court consistently issuing garbage opinions to empower Republican administrations and reconsolidate partisan policymaking to itself during Democratic administrations.

Regardless of how wrong the 5th circuit decision was in this case, the point was just to highlight that the law doesn't allow the government to circumvent restrictions by going through a third party. Clearly this particular case triggers strong feelings in you, but this is really not at all pertinent to the main point I'm making.

A point hasn't actually been made when the sole example, presented as fact, was a partisan lie that collapsed under extremely basic scrutiny. The decision had nothing to do with this strange notion that the courts err on the side of restraining the government and everything to do with the fact the 5th Circuit [yet again] presumed an alternate reality in order to achieve a Republican policy victory.

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