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My friends and family are not entities that have coercive power over me. If my employer sent me an email suggesting that it would be best if I get X done this week, I would understand it to mean that I'm taking a risk by electing to not do X. Closer still, if a police officer suggested that it would be best if I let him take a quick look around my car, I would understand that while I have the legal right to say no, I would be risking retaliation by doing so. Such retaliation would presumably be justiciable after the fact, but this would not lead me to believe that it's just a friendly suggestion about how things should go.
I certainly regard such requests as coercive. In fact, I would go so far as to say they're obviously coercive! How much coercion in an effort to induce someone to relinquish their Fourth Amendment rights is certainly an interesting question.
To put a fine point on it, I would say that anyone that doesn't understand the coercive nature of their interactions with government agents making helpful suggestions to them is verging into full quokka territory. Many or most representatives of the government might be disinclined to actually act maliciously against someone that declines to accept their advice, but quite a few people will accept the advice because of the implication.
Where exactly the line should be drawn isn't obvious to me and I wouldn't go so far as claiming that said implication means that federal government may never communicate with a social media platform, but all such communication should be made with the understanding that attempting to engage in viewpoint discrimination will be treated as a First Amendment violation. This particular case is so egregiously far from the line that there isn't even a great reason for a ruling to get close to laying out the definitive test.
Did your folks not teach you to say no regardless? I’m genuinely flummoxed.
Yes, I am aware that best practice is saying no. Nonetheless, I'm not going to pretend that the request isn't coercive. The whole reason it works a lot of the time is the implicit coercion.
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