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by Guvante 1011 days ago
They weren't prevented from saying wrong things or even penalized for lying.

They were deplatformed. You don't have a first amendment right to use platforms as you like and those platforms have the same first amendment right you do to decide what is brought forward as emphasized by that platform.

Should the government be allowed to influence that and in what way is an interesting question but it is less the end users rights and more the platforms rights in question here.

Getting removed from the algorithm isn't censorship.

3 comments

Platforms can deplatform you, they're not beholden to the first amendment. The government cannot. The case made here is that it was the government that performed the deplatforming by coersively deputizing the platforms to act on their behalf.

It's uncontroversial that the government cannot lawfully force private parties to do what it cannot lawfully do itself. The controversy here is mostly over if the governments actions were sufficiently coercive here for this to apply.

>They were deplatformed,

which is a penalty for "lying" and prevents them from saying "wrong" things.

in that time What's "wrong" and what's a "lie" could change within a few weeks (do masks help? in march 2020 people were called lunatics for believing so, in October 2020 people were called lunatics for not believing so. or consider the absurd psyop about the accidental lab leak hypothesis)

People weren't deplatformed for saying masks helped.
people spreading the absurd notion that face masks work the same outside hospitals as inside hospitals are causing panic and mask shortages. therefore they needed to be silenced. (that was the state of public discourse in april 2020, maybe you have repressed the memory)
Being deplatformed at the request of the government and being censored look an awful lot alike to me.