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Protect digital speech by defending platform editorial rights, banning state coercion by proxy, and allowing narrow privacy, safety, election, and national-security rules.
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AI-researched, unverifiedLast Reviewed
Jul 5, 2026
Cited Sources
10
What is failing, what we would change, and the conclusion we are willing to defend.
The First Amendment does not disappear online. It also does not become a tool for government to force private platforms to carry speech the state prefers. The right modern line is straightforward: government may speak, warn, criticize, investigate threats, and pass content-neutral laws aimed at real non-speech harms. It may not threaten platforms, vendors, payment processors, or advertisers into suppressing lawful viewpoints.
Current law already points there. The Supreme Court's 2024 platform cases treated feed curation and content moderation as expressive activity in core applications. The Court's 2024 coercion case reaffirmed that officials cannot use private intermediaries to punish disfavored speech. In 2025, the Court upheld the TikTok divest-or-ban law on narrow foreign-control and data-security grounds, not as a general permission slip for platform bans. It also upheld a Texas age-verification law for sites with sexual material harmful to minors, which should not be stretched into a universal ID-to-speak rule for ordinary online discussion.
Ban government coercion by proxy. Officials may criticize platforms and share lawful threat information, but may not threaten enforcement, licensing, procurement, funding, antitrust, or other state action to suppress protected speech.
Protect platform editorial discretion. States should not impose viewpoint-balancing, must-carry, or neutrality rules that make private platforms carry speech against their editorial judgment.
Permit narrow, content-neutral rules for privacy, fraud, foreign-adversary control, election mechanics, nonconsensual intimate imagery, child safety, and transparent paid political advertising when those rules are tailored and reviewable.
Prefer disclosure, provenance, authentication, competition, interoperability, and privacy tools over broad content bans. AI-12 and AI-13 own the deepfake-specific rules; this issue owns the constitutional boundary.
Require public reporting of recurring government-platform moderation contacts, with security-sensitive exceptions and delayed release where needed, so anti-coercion rules can be audited without exposing active investigations.
This position rejects two easy slogans. "Platforms are the public square" is not enough to justify state-compelled carriage. "Private companies can do whatever they want" is not enough to ignore concentrated platform power. The answer is to regulate power through durable tools that do not require the government to decide which lawful views must be amplified or buried.
Turn frustration into useful pressure.
If this position misses evidence or a lived consequence, challenge it. If it holds up, help test it locally and connect it to the issues around it.