The other issue is often it is government employees who have been paid by laws passed by congress (appropriations) making these requests. So the act of making t

The other issue is often it is government employees who have been paid by laws passed by congress (appropriations) making these requests. So the act of making the request potentially makes the appropriation a violation of the first amendment. I don’t think it’s a stretch to interpret the government using money to pay people to request twitter to remove protected speech as ‘abridging free speech’ and such appropriations as congress passing a law. There is similar case law for how publicly funded universities must conduct themselves. Though, even though you could make a similar argument for how public universities work I suspect courts have used a different argument to justify that framework. But it’s very weird to me that universities run by the state must be viewpoint and content neutral in their speech restrictions even if there is no explicit law passed by the government to restrict speech but the government is allowed to employ a mass of people to make ‘requests’ and such requests don’t need to pass a viewpoint and content neutrality test. The situations are very similar because in both cases there is not an explicit law passed by the government punishing people for making bad speech.