The government has plenty of ways to express thoughts. Almost every agency has a podium with a room full of reporters waiting whenever they want to make a statement.
For instance, if you're the FAA, you should express opinions about airline operations, air safety, etc. That is your role. If you are the FDA, you should express opinions about food and drug safety. And in both those cases note that you are a regulator, and within your domain, it is your role to regulate the players.
If you are the White House, you are not a regulator of anything. It is fine to express your opinion. In fact the White House has a daily press briefing for specifically that purpose. It is fine to call out people with whom you disagree. Perfectly OK to call them dangerous charlatans and liars. It is not OK to censor their speech. It is not OK use the implicit coercive force of the executive branch to encourage third parties to censor them.
> If you are the White House, you are not a regulator of anything
If you are the White House, you are the ur-regulator of anything any part of the executive branch is a regulator of, as well as the things that the Executive Office of the President is the actual direct regulator of (which are mostly internal to government operations.)
It's obviously not something they can say in press releases, but it also may not be factual (or provable). There are "we think" situations which are important.
Sure, in addition to all of their organs of dissemination, of which they have plenty of options, they can also have their own Twitter and Facebook accounts.
What they can’t do is ring up Twitter and Facebook and say, hey, that’s misinformation, do something about it. Or have government embeds giving guidance.
I don't think so. For example, if there is info on twitter that puts a government employee at risk, I think it's appropriate for someone to point that out to twitter.
They don't have enough channels to do that? They have to do it via veiled threat to a speech platform to delete users posts?
How can anyone defend this behavior? Just because it's your guy doing it? If Trump was telling Twitter to delete posts that hurt his re-election chances would you feel this same way?
Unbelievable that you're being downvoted at all. The authoritarian minded have definitely increased substantially as this site has become more popular and drawn increasingly larger crowds. When it was dominated by those capable of logic and reasoning and having some knowledge of the world, authoritarianism would get smacked down hard and rightfully so.
