Elon Musk makes $43 Billion offer for private buyout of Twitter

CoolBrees said
In your opinion, could the same reasoning you displayed in the last paragraph be used for online lies? (I hate the terms misinformation or disinformation - they're lies)

Online lies have incited an insurrection, caused a pizza place in NJ to have armed men show up to stop a nonexistent human trafficking ring that they didnt run out of a basement the building didn't have. And most recently, online lies were amplified so much that LEGAL Haitians immigrants are living in fear and having to close public schools - a constitutional right (14th amendment though not explicit) mind you.

At what point can the case made that online lies do reach the level? How many people need to be radicalized online and act violently before online lies are considered "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”?

I say now is the time to hold people responsible. Otherwise, we are going to be waiting for a tragedy so profound it will force the change. I'd rather not have a bunch of people die for us to realize you should have at least as much responsibility for the words that come off your keyboard as the ones that come out of your mouth.

The bar to clear is really high in terms of the incitation of violence has to be for an imminent and specific thing. Lies about Haitian immigrants almost certainly don't meet it because there is no specific call to action and none of it is a call for imminent violence. Maybe there is some that would qualify, but it's going to be an examination on case by case basis. SCOTUS generally is not friendly to prior restraint on speech. Particularly political speech which that stuff probably fits into. Traditionally, SCOTUS allows restriction on the time, place, and manner of speech, but no on the content of speech no matter how vile it might be.

But, this is even more complicated when you talk about online speech because it's done on private platforms when the 1st Amendment doesn't apply. For any Constitutional right to apply there must be state action. That concept was stretched quite in the past when the Court wanted to extend protection (civil rights cases in the 60s and 70s for instance), but I tend to doubt it would be found to apply to a private platform restricting speech. They do it all the time and have never to my knowledge been stopped on Constitutional grounds. So, the platforms could take it down or ban those users, but several of them lack the desire to do so for various reasons. At the same point, if the government attempted to tell those platforms what speech should or should not be allowed the Constitution would almost certainly prevent them from doing so unless it is truly incitation of imminent violence, i.e. "There is a Haitian wearing jeans and Sponge Bob T-Shirt on the corner of 4th and Red street in Brandenburgh, Ohio, I am calling on anyone in the area to kill him before he eats another pet" would likely not get Constitutional protection.