Threatening to shutter (or “strongly regulate”) websites that don’t publish favored political views is a threat to violate the First Amendment. https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1265601611310739456

And no surprise that it comes a day after Twitter added its own messages criticizing the president’s tweets as inaccurate.

None of this means that social media companies are exempt from criticism for how they regulate content. There are two questions: (1) Does the First Amendment give social media companies the right to regulate content? Yes. (2) Is the exercise of that right a good idea? Who knows!

There are good reasons to be skeptical of social media companies' content regulations. Automated filtering systems, for example, may disproportionately silence minority speakers, as their posts may be more likely to be flagged as offensive: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~msap/pdfs/sap2019risk.pdf.

Similarly, the intersection of government and social media deserves scrutiny. I recently surveyed over 200 public universities and colleges (who *are* bound by the 1A) to find out what words and users they blocked on their official social media accounts: https://www.thefire.org/no-comment-public-universities-social-media-use-and-the-first-amendment/

Turns out, if you give institutions the ability to regulate speech, they'll use it to burden their critics' speech. Or snark about their football teams. https://www.thefire.org/no-comment-public-universities-social-media-use-and-the-first-amendment/