Two years have passed since a story about Hunter Biden's laptop was published, and more news outlets have verified some of the contents. The decision was not a violation of the First Amendment.
One month before the election, the New York Post published a story about a laptop that belonged to Joe Biden's son Hunter. Users were initially blocked from sharing the link to the story due to fears it could be the result of hacking.
The initial decision to block the story from being shared was wrong, as evidenced by the reversal of the initial response. The New York Times and The Washington Post have verified the authenticity of some of the contents of the laptop.
The company's handling of the story was promised by Musk after he took over. Internal communications about the decision-making process were included in a thread published by Matt Taibbi on Friday.
According to Taibbi, the Trump White House and the Biden campaign asked for content to be removed from the site. Nude photos that would have violated the terms of service were included in some of the posts the Biden campaign requested be taken down.
Musk criticized the Biden team after he said he voted Republican.
Despite the fact that the Biden campaign was a private entity, and therefore not the government, Musk wrote that the Biden campaign was acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech.
The decision to suppress the story was not a violation of the First Amendment.
Doron Kalir is a professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. The First Amendment doesn't apply to state actors, but it does apply to state actors on social media.
Abridging the freedom of speech or of the press is not allowed by the amendment.
There is a congress. The government is covered by the courts at all levels. It depends on whether or not it can be seen as the government. The courts in the US have ruled that sites like Facebook are not a state entity. They are not part of a large corporation.
The federal courts have ruled many times that digital platforms are not state actors and that the government cannot restrict them.
Rather than violating the First Amendment, the private platform made its own decisions about what to publish.
As far as we know, the requests to remove specific content were simply requests.
"The state, the Trump White House, and the Biden team were all asking, and they were not obliged to either oblige or refuse those requests," Kalir said.
The White House acted like a state actor. Media and government cooperation is as old as government itself. The government is often used by journalists and news outlets.
It can also include requests from a state actor to delay publishing a story or even to refuse to give names for national security reasons. The outlets have the ability to agree or not.
"If the news outlet becomes a funnel for government information or disinformation, then it's no longer a private publication and you could claim that the First Amendment should be implicated," Kalir said.
There is no precedent in the US for a court to rule that a newspaper is acting as an arm of the government.
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