"Few Onion headlines have better captured this moment in history like, "Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be." Through the grace of social media, whatever dumbass legal theory a non-lawyer cooks up based on half-remembered court cases, can now metastasize throughout the country, plopped into the For You feeds of any other unfortunate souls that tech companies feel match the speaker's advertising demographic."
"People have gotten the Constitution wrong forever. And those same people have exercised their First Amendment right to utter their daft brain droppings. But we used to have an infrastructure in place to remind an unsuspecting, credulous audience that these people rest on a sliding scale between monumentally ill-informed and flat stupid. In the wake of Jimmy Kimmel's suspension, many have taken full advantage of the freedom to spread misinformation about the Constitution online."
"But, as people with real live law degrees, we're here to inform you that, no, the FCC threatening to take away broadcast licenses because they don't like comedians joking about Republicans is not a natural extension of Murthy v. Missouri - the Supreme Court case establishing that the government can, in fact, have a conversation with Facebook during a deadly pandemic to say posts about "injecting yourself with Lysol" is bad advice."
Social media rapidly amplifies imprecise or incorrect constitutional theories from non-lawyers, allowing such ideas to spread widely without traditional corrective gatekeepers. Older informational infrastructures that once helped expose and correct legal misunderstandings have weakened, leaving credulous audiences vulnerable. Murthy v. Missouri addressed non-coercive government communications with platforms during a public-health emergency to discourage dangerous misinformation. By contrast, threatening to revoke broadcast licenses over comedians' jokes is coercive and legally distinct. Sensationalized readings of internal platform documents and partisan spin have further distorted public understanding and conflated fundamentally different forms of government interaction with media platforms.
Read at Above the Law
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