In One Lawsuit, Louisiana & Missouri Say Gov’t Can Never Pressure Websites To Change; In Another, They’re Looking To Pressure Websites To Change

We've spent plenty of time over the last year or so on Missouri and Louisiana's lawsuit against the Biden administration for apparently suggesting how sites like Meta should moderate content on their platforms. That case has had its twists and turns and is now going before the Supreme Court. I'm sure we'll have plenty more to say on that case shortly, but last week we also saw the lawsuit where 33 states sued Meta for (what the lawsuit claims) is Meta's failures to keep kids from using the platform.

Two of the states that signed on were... Missouri and Louisiana.

So... I'm curious if there's any way to square these two lawsuits. Because as far as I can tell, the argument is that the government should never, ever even say anything that will pressure a website to change how it handles content on its website.

But also...

It's perfectly fine for the government to use the judicial system to... force a website to handle content in the manner that the state feels is best.

Of course, the reality is that it doesn't matter one bit that the two lawsuits are wholly inconsistent. This has always been about culture wars and headlines, and the earlier case is about the Attorneys General in Louisiana and Missouri scoring culture war points with the dumber segments of their voting bases, while the Meta lawsuit is about scoring techlash culture points among angry parents and teachers for failing in their jobs as parents and teachers.

But, really, it seems like reporters who are covering those two AGs might want to ask them directly how they can have both of these lawsuits going on at the same time. Can the government tell websites that host 3rd party speech how to operate or not?