Said another way... How could "Collusion between the Government and a private corporation" be supportive of Trump's effort here when he was heading the government that was allegedly doing the colluding.
https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1412828921242996738
> But what makes this meta-insane is that he’s claiming that the Facebook was a FEDERAL state actor because it was entangled with the FEDERAL government at a time when HE WAS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
The absolute purity of the status of Facebook et al. as private companies, free from any taint of government influence and hence free to suppress speech at corporate will, is looking a mite tattered.
Sure, blah blah deep state. Even if Fauci and Zuckerberg teamed up in some grand scheme to ban Trump from Facebook after an election that he lost -- the question remains -- how is that a 1st Amendment issue and not an Executive Branch staffing issue?
Given that we have a Unitary Executive (an argument held strongly by the most conservative jurists in the country) -- if someone in the Executive Branch were colluding to pressure social media companies with the power of the State, legally it was Trump who was colluding. So Trump is suing Facebook for colluding with his own government?
This lawsuit makes no sense on its face, it will be Cable News bait for a few days and then be forgotten, and unfortunately, it further clouds the much more important debate about social media platforms and their rights and responsibilities.
"When you have Mark Zuckerberg and others being called in front of Congress and being coerced and being questioned by all these congressmen, then you also have Mark Zuckerberg emailing with Dr. Fauci about COVID and in fact, a lot of their emails that we received have been redacted, not just because of phone numbers, but because they were trading trade secrets. A private company is communicating with the federal government and parts of that were redacted. They’re not immune anymore. They are not immune anymore. It was coercion, collusion, working together and they cannot hide from the first amendment."
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-press-conf...
For the 1 millionth time - the Fauci-Zuckerberg emails not only took place during the Trump administration, and were shared with the White House comms team, but they were also were released under FOIA during the Trump administration. All of these were released in 2020!
His government redacted the emails that he's complaining about being redacted. He's literally suing Facebook for colluding with his government and his attorney is using the redactions that his government performed as evidence of that collusion.
Just an astonishingly incompetent lawsuit and I hope the lawyers who filed it are sanctioned.
> This imputed Washington - SV nexus will be the fulcrum of the suit.
This doesn't and couldn't exist.
If you want to understand the purpose of the suit, check out the email they sent to his follower list as soon as the press conference was over:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5tKUD9WQAoJ82z?format=jpg&name=...
Just endless grifting.
Rep. Angie Craig (D, MN) questions Mark Zuckerberg in a Congressional hearing: "Facebook allows Rep. Greene's (R, GA) video to remain online. Is that right, yes or no?"
It should be fairly obvious why large companies want to be in the good graces of lawmakers. It's reasonable for Sundar Pichai or Mark Zuckerberg to think that angry lawmakers lead to more anti-trust lawsuits than happy lawmakers.
The problem is actually that both sides are angry at Big Tech, but for opposing reasons. The Democrats don't like that Republican content is the most popular on Facebook, and the Republicans don't like that Facebook doesn't deplatform Democrats engaging in the same or worse behavior as any deplatformed Republican.
Both of their concerns are understandable, and stem from the power of "deplatforming" – ever since the deplatforming of Alex Jones, this situation was inevitable. As soon as the platforms set a precedent for what's "bad," they created future obligations for themselves. Because they need to be consistent, right? So if you took down this "bad" thing, why not take down this other "bad" thing? Well, it turns out people have different definitions of "bad," and so that's where most of this vitriol originates.
Facebook has a 1st amendment right to host whatever content they want.. any desire toward consistency is entirely self-imposed. They could ban every single Democratic politician tomorrow if they wanted and people would be outraged, but the US government rightfully protects private companies from government-compelled speech.
Personally, I continue to believe that the algorithmic newsfeed is the primary source of these problems. Perhaps that's where we can find some common ground to take a logical first step. I propose that we regulate any Newsfeed with >100m impressions per day, to require and default to a "chronological" sorting order, with any preference expiring after 30 days.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-a-five-hour-hea...