Victory at the Ninth Circuit: Twitter’s Content Moderation is Not “State Action”https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/victory-ninth-circuit-twitters-content-moderation-not-state-action BY MUKUND RATHIMARCH 24, 2023
the Ninth Circuit held that Twitter did not act as the government by banning a user months after a government agency flagged for Twitter one of his tweets on alleged election fraud. O’Handley v. Weber is the latest decision rejecting social media users’ attempts to hold platforms liable for deleting, demonetizing, and otherwise moderating their content.
Twitter is a private entity, so the government and the courts cannot tell it what speech it must remove or what speech it must carry. The First Amendment restricts censorship only by the government, not private entities, unless those entities are using government power or otherwise effectively acting as the government.