If you haven’t been following the “Twitter Files” saga, the gist of it is that the US federal government routinely pressured pre-Musk Twitter, and likely other social media giants including Alpha (YouTube) and Meta (Facebook and Instagram), to stymie the dissemination of important information related to a certain infamous laptop, an important public health declaration, and various public disturbances in 2020 and early 2021, among other policy-relevant news items. The Twitter Files may expose one of the greatest breaches of the First Amendment in recent history, but there is plenty of precedent for federal government coercion of businesses, large and small. Almost 90 years ago, for example, the US government used a different blue bird, The Blue Eagle, to coerce company compliance with the worst type of disinformation of all: that related to prices.
Click for Full Text!
