[vorpalhex]

The legal issue is that they used the authority of the Whitehouse to do a "comply or there will be consequences".

We've all sat through various crappy powerpoints on ethics. That is plain and simple coercion. That's a first amendment issue and prohibited.

[ethanbond]

One minor hiccup being that the allegedly coerced entities didn’t claim (and still haven’t claimed) to have been coerced.

[perhonen]

perhaps because the threat of "comply or there will be consequences" worked.

[rtkwe]

Except most of the posts pointed out to places like Twitter stayed up with no moderation applied and the worst thing that's happened to Twitter recently is it's acquisition by Musk.

[vorpalhex]

Coercion doesn't have to be effective to be illegal, just like a bribe doesn't have to be accepted to be a bribe.

[mistrial9]

this is rewriting history .. the hysterical and high-pitched censorship of all things COVID-19 set a new low for the USA in modern times IMHO

California here

[EricE]

Why coerce when you can pay for it? The FBI just paid Twitter to do their dirty work.

[thieving_magpie]

I haven't looked into this issue in detail and was surprised to see such a brazen threat so I wanted to find information on your quote "comply or there will be consequences". I'm not able to see that in the context of white house or twitter. I haven't found anything close to it yet.

Could you point me to that information?

[throwoutway]

  > President Biden, press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy later publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship.

https://nclalegal.org/2023/01/the-white-house-covid-censorsh...