https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210510/11202346771/disgraced-yale-law-professor-now-defending-anti-vaxxers-court-with-his-nonsense-section-230-ideas.shtml

Back in January, we wrote about a bizarrely bad Wall Street Journal op-ed co-written by disgraced and suspended Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld, arguing that Section 230 somehow magically makes social media companies state actors, controlled by the 1st Amendment. This is, to put it mildly, wrong. His argument is convoluted and not at all convincing. He takes the correct idea that government officials threatening private companies with government retaliation if they do not remove speech creates 1st Amendment issues, and then tries to extend it by saying that because 230 gives companies more freedom to remove content, that magically makes them state actors.

As we noted at the time, that's not how any of this works. Companies' ability to moderate content is itself protected by the 1st Amendment. Section 230 gives them procedural benefits in court to get dumb cases kicked out earlier, but it most certainly does not magically make them an arm of the government. This wacky idea that social media is magically a state actor was rightly shut down by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh (who, ironically, is part of another scandal involving Rubenfeld) in the Halleck case, in which the Court stated clearly that you don't just magically make companies state actors. There are rules, man. From the ruling written by Kavanaugh: