What does "working with a third party" mean though? I haven't read this story closely because it seems unutterably boring and inconsequential to me, so maybe I've missed something - but from what little I've read it sounds like someone in the Biden team emailed Twitter to ask them to remove personal explicit photos from a member of the Biden family, and Twitter voluntarily complied?

If this is what happened (and again, I'll cheerfully admit I don't know) then this has pretty much nothing to do with free speech or the first amendment. It's just the government emailing a private organisation to ask them to do something, and then that organisation making a free choice to comply or not.

If this was done with threat of force outside of the scope of the government (i.e., not a legal request, but a threat of force like "we'll send in Delta Force) then that's a different story. But I at least a) assume this kind of thing happens allllllllll the time for things even more interesting than nudey shots of a Biden family member and b) is also completely and utterly legal.

(So legal, in fact, that Fox News has pretty obviously been doing it for decades with zero repercussions)

What does "working with a third party" mean though? I haven't read this story closely because it seems unutterably boring and inconsequential to me, so maybe I've missed something - but from what little I've read it sounds like someone in the Biden team emailed Twitter to ask them to remove personal explicit photos from a member of the Biden family, and Twitter voluntarily complied?

If this is what happened (and again, I'll cheerfully admit I don't know) then this has pretty much nothing to do with free speech or the first amendment. It's just the government emailing a private organisation to ask them to do something, and then that organisation making a free choice to comply or not.

If this was done with threat of force outside of the scope of the government (i.e., not a legal request, but a threat of force like "we'll send in Delta Force) then that's a different story. But I at least a) assume this kind of thing happens allllllllll the time for things even more interesting than nudey shots of a Biden family member and b) is also completely and utterly legal.

(So legal, in fact, that Fox News has pretty obviously been doing it for decades with zero repercussions)

doesn't bother to understand to whom the First Amendment does and just as importantly doesn't limit restricting speech. You wonder if he bothered to read the document he swore an oath to defend and yet he has no problem using the heavy hand of his office to interfere with the decisions of a non-government organization.

Yes, that's the purpose of government: Those highways and clean water aren't free, someone has to pay.

Has right-wing whingeing changed from "no new taxes" to 'no taxes'? We saw what 'no (corporate) taxes' did to Kansas but right-wing fanatics don't talk about that. They talk about what 'patriots' they are, toting guns, waving the flag, and shouting "evil gubbermint" and "my guy will fix it". Russia has a name for them: Useful idiots.

An astronaut falling into a black hole would die alone.