Isn’t that a good thing? It’s letting both Tesla employees and others know that the threats were empty, unenforceable and illegal.

It’s not like the original tweet wasn’t widely discussed.

Does the First Amendment amount to a fart in a thunderstorm any longer?

If anyone getting paid out of taxpayer funds doesn't grok the Bill of Rights, then their employment is what needs deleting.

I can't tell if you're being intentionally dense. Elon mixing his personal and business facing statements on his personal twitter account were his doing. He can no longer speak as a private citizen about Tesla on his twitter account, period. Anything he tweets is rightfully considered an official statement by a company representative.

By your logic, Elon could tweet Tesla's financial results on twitter during a quiet period before public release "because first amendment". The first amendment doesn't give you carte blanche to break the law without consequence...

> He can no longer speak as a private citizen about Tesla on his twitter account, period. Anything he tweets is rightfully considered an official statement by a company representative.

If equality before the law were a meaningful concept any longer, the distinction between business accounts with SEC constraints as modifying the 1A might be coherent.

These days the government enjoys the tyranny of selective enforcement (e.g. riots vs. "peaceful protests") to the extent that regarding your point as a fair one is challenging.

The first amendment doesn't protect a private company making statements on a private platform

If Elon stood on the street corner shouting lies into a megaphone? Sure, maybe there'd be an argument there

Thats complete nonsense. This isn't the private company making a decision on its platform, this is a government agency forcefully having a tweet removed.

Furthermore, the idea that the federal government can coerce private companies into taking actions which the government is explicitly Constitutionally denied (censorship) is scary in the extreme.

People need to think these things through ahead of them getting too far into Godwin's Law territory.

If I were to believe that the US Constitution made it impossible for the government to prevent companies from lying to employees about their rights, my conclusion would be "wow, the US Constitution is a pile of trash, let's get that fixed", not defending the megacorporations that are actively lying to millions in a desperate attempt to siphon more money out of the populace.

I don't understand the fascination of some sects of the United States with defending such obviously detrimental practices with "well under an extremely loose reading of this amendment it might technically be allowed, and as we all know amendments can't possibly be changed so there's nothing we can do".

The government isn't forcing Twitter to delete the message, they're forcing Musk to delete it. There's a big difference.

Just the levels of indirection involved in the tyranny.