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by mcrad 1286 days ago
Twitter is a public company ok?
1 comments

> Twitter is a public company ok?

(1) it is, in fact, not a public company, and

(2) it used to be a “public comoany” in the sense of “has shares traded on open stock markets rather than exclusively in individual off-market trades”, but that sense of “public” is still not a government actor covered by tbe restriction on the federal government in 1A or that on state governments in 14A. That is simply a different sense of the words “public” and “private” then is relevant here.

I do believe public vs. private is relevant in terms of legal responsibility, which you any many in the tech community are dismissing.
> I do believe public vs. private is relevant in terms of legal responsibility

The kind of “public vs. private” by which Twitter was once public is relevant in terms of whether or not they are subject to, say, certain SEC regulations, which are a form of “legal responsibility”, but it is not relevant to whether or not they are legally considered to be federal or state government entities under the 1st and 14th Amendments, such that they would be restricted from the kind of content-based restrictions the government is prohibited from imposing.