I watched with great interest yesterday's argument in Murthy v. Missouri, the former Missouri v. Biden. My sense was that most Justices were skeptical about the argument that the government violates the First Amendment simply by noncoercively urging and "substantial[ly] encourag[ing]" platforms to restrict speech.
Among other things, as Justices Kavanaugh and Kagan suggested, the government likely ought to be free to, for instance, call up an editor to ask the editor not to run a story (or publish an op-ed) that the government thinks might interfere with some investigation, or be unfair, or simply be inaccurate, so long as this is understood as a request and not a coercive demand. I tentatively think that has to be right; and the challengers to the law didn't seem to have much of a response.
On the other hand, the discussion (including Justice Kagan's example of the government asking platforms to remove pro-terrorist speech, even when it's constitutionally protected) crystallized one thing that's troubling me and I expect some others.
