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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nIf you were someone who made money from social media because of the number of followers you had, and you shared such incendiary rhetoric on your platform channel, you would soon find that, magically, no one was seeing your posts. It\u2019s commonly called \u201cShadow banning.\u201d You were finding that you were \u201caccidentally suspended\u201d for a day or 2. When returning, you would find that the number of followers to your page had dramatically decreased. This happened to the Babylon Bee. It happened to many conservative commentators. Some would go from somewhere around 100k followers, get temporarily suspended, and return with 12k followers. Their explanation was \u201coops.\u201d Well, we now may have a decent idea where the \u201coops\u201d was coming from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If the documents are real and this story is true (Big \u201cIF\u201d), the federal government has had open access to being able to quickly squash what it deems \u201cdisinformation.\u201d<\/a> Why is that a big deal? Because the government isn\u2019t allowed to do that, per the 1st<\/sup> amendment. However, a private company is not bound by the constitutional limits of free speech, per section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). So how did the government get away with doing this? Through social media platforms. Ok, but social media companies are private. Yup, this is where it gets dicey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is something called a \u201cState action doctrine.\u201d Basically, there are two instances where actions of private parties are deemed acting on behalf of the state, or \u201cstate action.\u201d One is when a private entity does something that is normally reserved for government. This part of the state action subject can be seen in the U.S. Supreme court case Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck<\/a>. <\/em>In this case, New York had a regulation that required cable networks with more than 36 channels to have a public access channel. A disgruntled employee of the public access channel MNN was fired and chose to sue on violation of constitutional rights. The Court ruled that running a TV station was not a function exclusive to the government because both public and private companies ran TV stations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another side of a case like was in Marsh v. Alabama<\/a><\/em>. In this case, Chickasaw, Alabama was a privately owned company town. Grace Marsh wanted to distribute religious material throughout the town. Marsh was convicted of criminal trespass for doing so. Marsh appealed that her 1st<\/sup> amendment protections were violated. The Court agreed with Marsh. Even though the town was privately owned, it acted in a manner that was normally a function of the government and thus created a conflict between property rights and constitutional rights. Justice Black stated that when those are in conflict, constitutional rights should take priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other instance in which private parties are deemed to be acting on behalf of the state is if there is a close relationship between the actions of the private party and what the government seeks to accomplish. American University Law Review lists this out in detail HERE<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, one could make a solid claim that section 230 of the CDA is unconstitutional solely based on Carter v. Carter Coal Company<\/a><\/em> in which the Court ruled that government power cannot be delegated to a private company so that the private company can then regulate other private companies, or even its own, which seems to be exactly what happened with the passing of section 230.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, one doesn\u2019t have to look far to find a case much like what we\u2019re seeing in the \u201csocial media v. free speech\u201d debate. In fact, I had to look directly into an organization that I\u2019ve worked with for 15 years. In Brentwood Academy v. TSSAA<\/a><\/em>, the TSSAA, which is recognized as the leading and primary organization for the regulation of school sports, both public and private, penalized Brentwood Academy for putting \u201cundue influence\u201d on football recruits. Brentwood academy sued that these actions by the TSSAA violated their First and Fourteenth amendment rights. The TSSAA held that they were a private company. The Court agreed with Brentwood Academy that because there is such a close relationship between the private company\u2019s function and that which the government seeks to uphold, and because the TSSAA was recognized by the state board of education as the primary organization to regulate sports, that there was no reason to \u201cclaim unfairness in applying constitutional standards\u201d to the TSSAA. If these DHS documents are real, there has been, for some time, a VERY close relationship between the government and social media tech giants, namely Facebook and Twitter. Watching this all play out will be interesting. But anytime someone wants to silence someone else\u2019s speech, it\u2019s of the utmost priority to know why, and it\u2019s never \u201cfor the good of the people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stay Classy GP!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grainger<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cConspiracy theorists are everywhere these days!\u201d \u201cStop the spread, get the vaccine!\u201d \u201cCare about your neighbor, have a heart, think of someone other than yourself!\u201d These are all very familiar words of virtue signaling, shaming, condescendingly accusatory from the morally superior. It wasn\u2019t enough that you disagree or that you choose to make a decision … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tidbitsofaudacity.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/DHS-leak.jpg\")
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