When Government and Big Tech Collude Against the First Amendment: an Interview With Nadine Strossen

 

BY SAM HUSSEINI

It’s become media orthodoxy that big tech firms are not bound by the First Amendment. This conventional wisdom posits that Facebook, Google and Twitter, with their near enormous powers, can squash and skew speech as the wish without effective legal recourse.

However, Nadine Strossen, who was president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008 and is now professor at New York Law School puts forward the following argument:

“even private sector actors are directly bound by constitutional norms, including the First Amendment free speech guarantee, if you can show that there is in the legal term to describe this is called entanglement, sufficient entanglement between the government officials and the nominally private sector actors, that if they are essentially conspiring with the government doing the government’s bidding, the government can’t do an end run around his own constitutional obligations that way.”

I recently spoke to Strossen, please excuse the not terribly photo-oped nature of the audio and video. A very lightly edited and hopefully sufficiently cleaned up transcript of the interview is below.

Husseini: We’ve seen a lot of concerns about big tech, over the last several years, and especially in the last year. I encountered it with effective targeting of people talking about possible lab origins of the pandemic. But in the last week or so, we’ve seen the Biden administration make more direct comments about it regarding Facebook, and so on. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Strossen: Right. Now, I saw that Amy Klobuchar has now introduced some legislation that’s pending and I’m sure there’s other legislation that’s pending, that would cut back, that would eliminate, Section 230 immunity for any social media company that does not sufficiently restrict so-called disinformation about COVID. …

Strossen: I very much believe, I’m like you, I’m independent thinking I’m much more of a civil libertarian, than I’m a person of the left, right or center. Individual freedom as the prerequisite for everything else that we pursue in society, including through politics. And coming from that perspective, I am very loath to cut back on freedom of communications companies, including the social media giants, but I’m also very concerned about the power that they have been exercising to arbitrarily, discriminatorily, at their whim, to suppress particular speakers and particular ideas. That has been troubling enough to me for a long time. How do we find a solution that is respectful of their rights, but also recognizes that for all practical purposes, given their power, we the people are not going to have meaningful free speech rights as individuals or as participants in our democratic republic if they continue to have such completely unbridled, unaccountable, censorial power.

Strossen: In some ways, I believe that these tech giants are more powerful than government officials, because the government — take Donald Trump versus Mark Zuckerberg. Trump could be dis-elected, he could be sued, he can be impeached. And none of the above is true for Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, etc, no free speech rights against them, no due process rights against them. And my concerns have been heightened in I would say the past few months, maybe since the beginning of this year, as they’re saying, yeah, no, actually going back to January 6th of course, as we’ve seen more and more of a coalescence between particular political and government leaders, putting increasingly overt pressure on the tech companies to censor speech that these politicians don’t like and that they would be completely barred by the First Amendment from directly censoring themselves. And yet, they’re outsourcing the censorship power, that at least with government exercises, we have recourse we can go to court and sue them under the First Amendment. We can’t do that when they pressure the social media companies to do their bidding. And I think January 6th was a turning point because I don’t think it was a coincidence. And I’m obviously not alone in thinking it was not a coincidence that after Biden is certified as President, and after the two Georgia senatorial elections come out in a way that’s favorable to Senate Democrats, then we have the major platforms kicking Donald Trump off. I think if the elections had come out the other way, the political pressure would have been different and their reaction would have been different.

Strossen: So from from a legal perspective, since you’re following this, Sam, you probably know that everything I’m saying about the collaboration between government and these tech giants, whether you call it collaboration or pressure, the interrelationship between the two is constitutionally significant, because even private sector actors are directly bound by constitutional norms, including the First Amendment free speech guarantee, if you can show that there is in the legal term to describe this is called entanglement, sufficient entanglement between the government officials and the nominally private sector actors, that if they are essentially conspiring with the government doing the government’s bidding, the government can’t do an end run around his own constitutional obligations that way.

Strossen: And starting early in the year, maybe even toward the end of last year, we started seeing a number of op-eds and law review articles written by legal scholars, interestingly, across the ideological spectrum, progressive, liberal, conservative, libertarian very different perspectives on the policy issues. But all of them saying there are serious arguments here that these tech giants are colluding sufficiently with the government that they should be subject to some restraints under the First Amendment, or perhaps, as so-called common carriers or public utilities. All of those ideas got a big shot in the arm when Clarence Thomas issued a concurring opinion, I believe it was in April, in the Knight case coming out of Columbia University, and he didn’t affirmatively conclusively endorse that theory. But he said it’s, you know, it should be taken seriously. It should be looked into. And since then, there have been a raft of lawsuits that are premised on that theory, including the ones that Donald Trump himself recently brought. And I have to say, you know, you talk about certain orthodoxies on the left, I was really shocked at how cavalier and how dismissive the so-called mainstream media was in sneering at Trump’s lawsuit, because it really has to be taken seriously. Now, the facts are in dispute, but as a matter of principle, if in fact, his allegations can be shown to be factually correct, that Twitter and the others were other tech companies were acting sufficiently under pressure, that their actions were sufficiently induced by government pressure. As a matter of law, that means that there is a serious First Amendment challenge here. And many others have brought similar lawsuits citing Thomas and citing these various law professors that I’ve mentioned. So it’s, it’s — I don’t know what the facts are going to show. But they’re definitely worth investigating.

Husseini: I know that the Robert Kennedy Jr’s group, the Children’s Health Defense — I just saw the other day they had? I don’t know if you follow that as well — 

Strossen: Yes, I find on these issues, a source that is very helpful to spite what I think is a conservative libertarian leaning, but the way you follow these, you take each piece of information or opinion for what it’s worth, you evaluate it on its own, but I like to follow sources like that, because they give me leads to stories that aren’t covered in the mainstream press. And I can then investigate on my own. So this is something called “Reclaim the Net“. It’s based in the UK and it comes out at least Monday through Friday, maybe on weekends, as well. And they are very good about letting you know if there’s another such lawsuit, and they’re also very good about getting the complaints. So you know, you can link to the litigation documents yourself. I would strongly recommend that but my my best impression is that there have been at least half a dozen such lawsuits in the past couple of months, and some of them, at least one or two have survived a motion to dismiss. I don’t know if you’re a lawyer or not. If not, I’d be happy to explain that. That means that a court has actually ruled that the allegations in the complaint are sufficient as a matter of law. It remains to be seen whether the facts that are alleged can be proven as a matter of evidence, but that if the facts can be shown as a legal matter, the complaint could succeed. And that’s significant.

Husseini: Let me just tell you what I know. And then please, you know, elucidate I know in the Children’s Health Defense group that I think was on course to be tossed out. And I think their allegation was that Facebook is effectively a state actor. And I was kind of surprised that the Biden administration was so explicit, last week vis a vis, their seeming guidance or coercion, or however we want to put it, of Facebook. I would have expected these things to be done with a wink and a nod behind closed doors. And I don’t quite understand why it came out into the public view, to be honest.

Strossen: Yeah. And obviously Biden walked back his comments, but it’s a, I think it is a tough burden to show that even rhetorics such as the social media companies are killing people. That because that itself is, as you will know, an exercise of First Amendment protected speech, it’s taken as rhetorical hyperbole that is especially protected when it’s in the political sphere. And it’s just, there’s no bright line, obviously, between persuasion, inducement, encouragement — the government is allowed to do all of that, right. We want the government to use its to bully pulpit but not to bully people, but to encourage people and companies to do what they consider to be wise and good from a policy perspective.

Strossen: But, at some point, it goes beyond encouragement and inducement and becomes coercion. And as I say, that’s a delicate matter. And given the strong presumption in favor of free speech, and the strong presumption in favor of free enterprise, both of which I support, I think there’s very much the burden of proof on those who are trying to, to show that this is in fact, state action.

Strossen: So, to answer your question more directly, Sam, I think that’s why, given the comfort that, oh, you know, there’s so few precedents where the Supreme Court has found that a private sector actor should be treated as a state actor under the entanglement doctrine. And interestingly enough, at least in the past, the conservative justices have been the ones that have the narrowest view of state action, they really do not want private sector entities to be treated as state actors. Now, that may be changing, given the changing realities. I mean, to have Clarence Thomas, of all people, speaking out on this shows that maybe there’s been a flip, maybe now we’re going to find that the conservative justices are taking, you know, a more expansive view, they are probably as a result oriented as everybody else in the political sphere.

Husseini: The more expansive view, meaning that they are more inclined to say the government or should not restrict —

Strossen: I think that now, I would not be surprised if we see conservatives, at least some of the conservative justices who have a dim view of the tech giants might be more willing to hold that they are state actors. They’re traditionally the last time the Supreme Court had a state action decision, it was a long time ago, David Souter was still on the court. And he wrote the majority opinion it was 5-4 and he and the other liberals had a more expansive view of when private sector entities could be treated as state actors and, and Thomas and the other conservatives strongly dissented. Now, you know, we may see a bit of a flip flop in that orientation.

Husseini: Can you clarify what you know, what the cases were, what the entanglement doctrine is, and so on. I mean, I have all kinds of questions, but I think you putting it in a legal framework might help guide.

Strossen: I’d be happy to and you know, now that since these topics are in the news all the time more people know about it, but until very recently, most people were shocked to learn that the Constitution with all of its guarantees of freedom, including free speech, only restraints the government that it has no applicability at all, to any private sector actor with two exceptions that the Supreme Court has crafted over time. And one of the exceptions is the so-called public function exception. The other exception is the so-called entanglement exception. Until recently, the public function exception was the one that litigants who are suing big tech companies would invoke that they consistently lost. And that is that if the private sector entity is performing a function that has traditionally and exclusively been performed by the government, then that private sector entity is treated as a state actor, a very clear example would be a private prison, right? Operating prisons is something that has traditionally exclusively been done by the government, the government should not be able to outsource its actions as an incarcerator or to a private sector entity, and thereby escaped Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. So the argument that was made with respect to the tech giants, was, they are providing the kind of public forum for the expression of ideas and the discussion of ideas that traditionally has been provided by the government, through forums such as public parks and streets and sidewalks.

Strossen: And the courts have consistently rejected that argument because the Supreme Court until now has interpreted the public function exception very narrowly, the narrow word there being exclusively. So if there is any private sector actor that in the past has provided a kind of public forum, it would show that the government has not traditionally exclusively done that. And in fact, there have been many private sector entities that have provided communications forums. In fact, a couple of years ago, and a case involving some public access TV station in New York, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that it should be treated as a state actor under this public function exception. So that was going nowhere. And interestingly enough, not until this spate of legal articles started coming out late last year, early this year, at that point, arguing that well, maybe the entanglement exception should apply. But that was novel, no litigants had even raised that argument. But so it is significant in the Children’s Health Case that you mentioned, and the Trump complaints and the half dozen or so others that I’ve noticed in reclaim the net. This is the first time that people are trying to sue big tech under this second exception. It’s usually summarized as entanglement. And it basically means when there is sufficient cooperation or interrelationship somehow between the government and the private sector entity, either they are conspiring together, or the government is pressuring, in effect, coercing, even if not literally coercing as a practical matter, putting so much pressure on the private sector entity that it is, in fact, in effect, carrying out government orders.

And you can understand logically why it makes sense to have that exception, we can’t have the government be able to do it and run around its own constitutional obligations, its own inability to censor so-called disinformation or other kinds of constitutionally protected speech by forcing these powerful private sector entities to do it. And so then it really comes down to a factual question. Has the government here or particular politicians or particular government officials, crossed the line from permitted encouragement of these companies, they may encourage the companies to take off this information. But when does it cross the line to become unpermitted inducement or conspiracy? And there’s a lot of evidence, as you say, a lot of statements have been made. A lot of hearings have been held, letters have been written, threats have been quite explicit, which is why I think the Klobuchar, I even read the press release in which she announced her legislation, it was basically, you know, I kept asking them and test them out during hearings, I kept asking them to do more about disinformation, and they didn’t. So now we’re, you know, now we’re proposing this legislation. We’re going to punish them. We’re going to take away their immunity. We’re going to force them and I think that’s very good circumstantial evidence that all of this, you know, hearing process was really part of a coercive pattern, you better do it voluntarily, or we’re going to do it to you.

Husseini: And you’re, all the comments by Psaki, which were, you know, there are whatever it was, she said 10 or so, you know, people producing all of this disinformation, seemingly telling them who to target. I think the next day she made a comment like we will — If somebody is booted from one platform, why should they be on another platform? That’s quite a far reaching statement.

Strossen: That’s a hit list. One thing I have to say about the Supreme Court’s and other courts’ analysis of the First Amendment, is that the First Amendment provides that Congress which has been interpreted as meaning any government official at any level of government, shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. So they the key verb, there is abridging, and the Supreme Court rightly has interpreted that verb in a very functional, practical sense, as going far beyond literal banning or punishment. Anything that as a practical matter, has a speech suppressive impact, including something that has what the courts often call a chilling impact on speech. So even if there’s not an express threat, that we’re going to punish you, we’re going to take away your Section 230 immunity, or we’re going to you know, be hard on you in other ways, even if that’s not an express threat, if it’s understood as such by the companies that they fear, well, we better do this, you know, we want to earn in favor of not displeasing Congress, that would be seen as an abridgment.

Husseini: What are the roots of the whole entanglement thing? How has it? You seem to indicate that it had been utilized in the distant past?

Strossen: It has been utilized in the past, I think the last time the Supreme Court used it was in this case, it was a case involving a High School athletic association. It was the one I mentioned where Souter wrote the majority opinion. So that would have been probably in the 2000s, I would guess, so it’s not that long ago. But it was, interestingly enough, he used I’m sorry, now you’re really getting into the weeds. He used the term entwinement, which drove the conservative dissenters nuts, they said, Is this a new exception, even beyond the entanglement doctrine, and it did seem that he was suggesting that and the four who joined him, that even a looser relationship between the government and the austensibly private sector entity would be enough to create an exception to the state action doctrine. But for some reason, it just wasn’t seen as applying to the tech giants, as I say until until very recently, and the same Supreme Court precedents have been cited over and over, I would say, a really good short short but complete, concise piece for you to read Sam, it was the first one I remember seeing in this series, and I’m referring to which was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, by Jed Rubenfeld, who’s a professor at Yale Law School, and he coauthored it with Vivek Ramaswamy. I believe I’m so sorry, I’m not remembering. And he’s a tech entrepreneur himself. But if you look up, Jed Rubenfeld you’ll have no problem finding that. And I think that came out maybe in either at the end of last year or the beginning of this year. I could probably also, I think, recently, Eugene Volokh, who is very, very good on these issues, and he does a daily blog on First Amendment issues. I think he recently summarized the case law. There’s just a handful of precedents. And so the question is, you know, are they factually analogous or are they not?

Husseini: Entanglement? And you said the other term was entwinement, there’s a reporter, Whitney Webb, who has been documenting, among other things, and I’m blanking on their names, but numerous officials who have gone from government to big tech…

Strossen: Yeah, that could be that could certainly be relevant evidence.

Husseini: The, but forgive me I mean, before Souter, I’m just curious, historically, you know what I mean, what, how far back does the whole entanglement thing go?

Strossen: I know, there have not been very many Supreme Court cases at all either the public function or entanglement line. Probably there were a few cases during the civil rights era because there was a great zeal on the part of the court to reach out to private sector entities before to apply the equal protection clause to them before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed. So there was a famous case involving a parking lot that was privately owned, but it was in a government owned building and the parking was in Washington, DC, I think, and the parking lot discriminated on the basis of race. And I think there the Supreme Court said there was enough entanglement between the private sector parking lot and the government, that they should not be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race. But that all went away after 1964, because then there was a statutory ban on private sector discrimination. So I think that was the last time that there was really any big attempt to treat private sector entities as bound by any constitutional guarantee.

Husseini: To me coming at it from partially a media criticism perspective, you probably recall, you know, in Watergate, they attempted to leverage the fact that the Washington Post had FCC holdings as a way to sort of shoot the, you know, a shot across the bow of the Washington Post, when they were looking at publishing part of the Pentagon Papers and in Watergate. And more generally, I mean, during the build up to the Iraq War, you had Colin Powell, as Secretary of State and his son, as FCC commission. So you do have these situations, which are perhaps clearer than what we’ve seeing before but it to me, it has been sort of a fraught kind of thing where so-called private media have to sort of fall into line when it comes on to so-called national security issues, or that they either gotta fight or fold. My point of view, they more typically folded if they had any interest in fighting with Watergate as sort of the exception in this regard.

Strossen: I know that there was a huge amount of pressure that was put on the media after 9/11. Yeah, you raise a very, very good point.

Husseini: Yeah. I mean, and, you know, you’re talking about their power or being more powerful than the President in some respects. I mean, it’s a recipe for collusion more than a coercion you get was a monopoly status, you have to toe the line when it comes to, again, so called national security issues, and, and it could well become the worst of all worlds.

Strossen: Right. And either one of those would be, either collusion or coercion would be enough to satisfy the entanglement exception to the state action doctrine.

Husseini: Even if it’s at some level voluntary on both of their parties?

Strossen: Absolutely. And if you look at the I think the complaint I’ve met read read most recently was the Trump complaint. And it does allege both theories as I recall, opposing conspiracy and a coercion.

Husseini: …Section 230 can you break that down a little bit more? I know a lot of people have followed it. But you mentioned it at the beginning.

Strossen: Sure, Section 230 of the communications decency Act was passed by Congress in 1996. When it was Congress’s first response to the Internet, and most of the communications decency act was struck down as unconstitutional in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, I’m proud to say, which outlawed so called indecent or offensive communications online. But the positive provision in in the Communications Decency Act, the CDA, which we did not challenge, is Section 230, and we had huge bipartisan support, it was designed to empower the end user rather than the provider of online services, to make their own determinations about what they wanted to see or what not to see online and to do that was trying to foster, you know, a plethora of moderation or lack of moderation options. So the idea was that there would be, you know, let 1000, or a zillion flowers bloom, you can choose whatever service provider you want, and some of them will be heavily filtered for some things, and some will be heavily filtered for other things, and some will be unfiltered.

Strossen: And let the user decide rather than a top down government mandated or uniform provider mandated approach. And the way to do that, and the way to and also, the way to allow anybody to take advantage of the internet by becoming a speaker, disseminating messages to anybody else in the world with an internet connection was to relieve intermediaries of any liability for, with very few exceptions, for content that’s put on by third parties. So that was, so there would not be no incentive on the part of service providers or other intermediaries to serve as gatekeepers, because they wouldn’t have any liability. And there was also no disincentive on them to provide some gatekeeping function. So if they wanted to, you know, if they thought their user base didn’t want to see graphic violence, they could take that off, and they wouldn’t be liable, even though the government itself would not be allowed to censor graphic violence.

Strossen: And that worked very well until the era of platformization, which I gather began in around 2010 or so where the gatekeeper function was taken over by these giant tech platforms. And so their content moderation policies, so-called, are in fact imposing top down constraints on a very high number of users for very important communications. And it’s evolved or devolved very rapidly. Initially, all of these companies bragged that they just wanted, you know, all speech to be free and Jack Dorsey boasted that Twitter is the free speech wing of a free speech party. I think he did hold out the longest, but it was in response to a lot of political pressure fairly recently, in the advent of social media, that the content moderation started becoming stricter and stricter. Now, in fairness, they were getting pressured not only from government officials and politicians, but also from users, from employees from consumers, and last but very far from least, the mainstream media, your colleagues in the journalism profession and I’m just really shocked.

Husseini: — It’s funny when they’re referred to as “my colleagues” —

Strossen: Exactly, exactly touche, but isn’t it shocking. I just can’t believe it.

Husseini: It’s like the only thing they won about, you know, they lost on the economic model, they lost on so many things. But in effect, you know, mainstream social, big tech, all the social networks in the sort of the worst way. I’m curious, did the ACLU not anticipate the potential monopolization or —

Strossen: I think very few people did. One of them is my husband who back in the day, he’s a expert on information technology and runs a center on point that he founded at Columbia University. And when everybody is, was rejoicing about this potential new way to give free speech and humans bred human rights, which it certainly did have that potential. And it’s done a lot. I know I’ll never lose sight of all the positive every day, including all of your work that’s facilitated by this technology. He wrote something way back in the early 90s, called ‘The Dark Side of the Internet’. And, you know, he predicted some of the problems that we’ve been seeing. And there were a few others. They were voices in the wilderness.

Husseini: Robert McChesney, in his writings, in terms of the development of the internet, talks about the post office had a proposal to provide email in the 1970s and that was squashed in effect, facilitating the development of privatization of the internet. And, you know, I sort of wonder if we’ve evolved in this way, I don’t know what level what decisions were made with guidance to provide, effectively plausible deniability, which is, I mean, less and less plausible in terms of the collusion that we’re talking about, and I’ve sometimes wanted to say, okay, maybe we should go back to that, that these are effective monopolies, though, it should be run by something like the post office that is a common carrier. But there’s like an asterix on top of that. Doesn’t the post office, I remember after 9/11, I think they juiced up the capacity of the Post Office to actually breach that and tamper or at least examine mail in some instances.

Strossen: You’re exactly right, that they’ve engaged in surveillance has been troubling. But at least they are democratically accountable with a small d, right, in a way that private corporations are not.

Husseini: Right, right. You know, democratically accountable. And I suspect to some degree, I think, you know, the sort of financial starving of the post office, I think, part of the function of that is to disabuse everybody with the notion that that could be seen as an instrument of democratization, which, which it was, I mean, it’s a very conservative position. Right. It’s in the Constitution, I think, one of virtually the only federal agencies that’s there from the start. So you would think, would be a bedrock of conservative principles in terms of how to have communication in governance at this point in time.

Strossen: Yes. I don’t know how deep or wide you want to go. I mean, there’s such complex, interrelated issues. But I, for me, the single most reliable source on tech / civil liberties issues is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF, I found its website to be very good and very thoughtful. And they had something recently, one of their experts wrote something about the shift between a protocol based internet to a platform based internet and was recommending how we could move back in the direction of protocols that would be closer to the original conception of empowering individual end users, rather than these intermediary gatekeepers.

Husseini: I mean, my undergrad degree was in applied math and computer science. You know, if I’ve gone another road, I could have gone out to California gotten a piece of the pie. But the promise of the internet, you know, when I went to school in the 1980s, with, you know, the World Wide Web, and it’s not worldwide, in many ways, I mean, it technically, but it does not tend to facilitate cross-national communication typically.

Strossen: So probably you’ve found the inventor of the World Wide Web.

Husseini: Right, right, in Switzerland.

Strossen: He started something called the World Wide Web Foundation, I think within the last year or so, with the goal of returning it to its former —

Husseini: Promise, right. And I’m not not an expert in it. I don’t want to defame anybody but I think EFF has been criticized they’ve gotten a good chunk of money from big tech folks as well, that might have skewed some of their — 

Strossen: You know, that’s a fair question to raise. I am not aware of that. I am aware of another organization in this space that’s received that criticism but thank you for pointing that out. I tried to read everything with, you know, healthy skepticism, about everything but a healthy open mindedness toward everything right?

Husseini: Absolutely, I think that doesn’t preclude that they do good work. And the point that you made about a protocol based rather than I think this may well be a substantial part of the solution here. Would you have any assessment as to your former organization, the ACLU, how they performed under these conditions?

Strossen: I would say, you know, what’s happened in the online space is what’s happened in a number of other areas. The ACLU is an all purpose organization, you know, when something new comes along, and we’re the leaders, but then other organizations come along and specialize just in that particular area. So I think that, you know, the ACLU is doing much less in the area, because EFF and Center for Democracy and Technology and a number of others are, you know Access Now. You know, there’s a whole slew of organizations that are doing nothing but of same thing on campus free speech, you the first hate speech codes that came along, the ACLU brought along the first couple of lawsuits and then a new organization was founded by, the foundation for individual rights and education to do nothing but work on campus free speech. So the ACLU has not done as much and so I, you know, we have, I think maybe one or two staff members that do anything serious, maybe maybe a few more, but it’s a small number of people compared to these other organizations.

Husseini: I didn’t realize it was that small. It came to mind for me, because Glenn Greenwald, who I also have mixed feelings about — who I think does some excellent work and some other things that I’m not terribly fond of. But he, as soon as the White House started issuing these statements about a week ago, you know, it was like, “Okay, where’s the ACLU?” And then they say something a couple of days later. 

Strossen: And that was probably by Kate Ruane, there are like two people, I think, who really specialize in there on the internet is it’s not for lack of commitment to the principles, it’s just trying to do things that others aren’t doing the focus resources there.

Husseini: Okay, thank you very much. It’s been a delight talking to you and educational for me. I’ll follow through on some of the stuff.

Strossen: Oh, thank you so much. Well, if you do that, I’d like to see a link to that and I’ll circulate it to my channels as well.

This interview was conducted on this afternoon of Friday, July 23.

Sam Husseini is founder of the website VotePact.org. 

   https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/07/30/when-government-and-big-tech-collude-against-the-first-amendment-an-interview-with-nadine-strossen/