Palantir Is Doing First Amendment Arbitrage?

Shiffrin in "Unfit to Print" argues that government officials, namely Donald Trump, violate the First Amendment by misrepresenting matters of public concern, while private citizens, who must be free to attack even the Constitution, do not. Private platforms are meant to reach unconstitutional but nonjusticiable government speech. I found the point Shiffrin made convincing, but I found myself questioning how this extended to quasi-governmental entities.

On April 18th the official Palantir twitter account published a set of 22 theses from Alex Karp's The Technological Republic. Karp asserts that Silicon Valley engineers have an affirmative obligation to defend the nation; that national service should be universal; that the postwar "neutering" of Germany and Japan must be reversed; and that ranking cultures as flourishing or dysfunctional must be re-legitimized as a matter of public reason. Some of these points directly violate the constraints Shiffrin believes are placed on governmental speech. Palantir and Karp are not elected officials, but calling them private citizens would also be stretching. Most of its revenue comes from federal contracts, and its products structure how ICE, the military, and central intelligence project state power. Shiffrin's framework sees this as acceptable. Karp did not have to take an oath, so the First Amendment does not bind him the way it binds Trump.

Palantir wields enormous soft power, and that soft power lets contractors do something the First Amendment is supposed to prevent. Several of Karp's theses are positions a sitting government official could not legally voice without violating Shiffrin's constraints. A Pentagon spokesperson asserting that postwar Germany and Japan must be re-armed, or that some cultures are dysfunctional and regressive, would conflict the state's commitments to its own foreign policy and to equal citizenship (1007). The state cannot say these things openly. Palantir can, and when Palantir says them, the regime gets the benefit of the message without shouldering the liability. The contractor functions as a laundering channel for the regime's fringe and unconstitutional positions. Palantir is not just another voice in the "town square of the internet" Musk's X claims to be. It represents the interests of politicians who cannot voice these positions themselves, and those politicians endorse it with billions of dollars in contracts.

Private platforms could refuse to host Trump tweeting attacks on the press, and they did. They cannot meaningfully refuse to host the entire defense-tech ecosystem articulating the regime's hardline positions, especially when the platforms themselves are part of that ecosystem. So I want to ask whether the constraint placed on politicians by the First Amendment, as Shiffrin so convincingly articulates, is purely performative when the actors politicians fund can voice the same positions, with greater reach, while her framework treats those actors as private citizens. The First Amendment cannot bind Karp the way it binds Trump. But Karp is now articulating the regime's most legally suspect positions to the largest audience. If this doctrine only catches oathbearing officials, then what can we do about government backed defense mega-corporations publishing directly unconstitutional theses on what society ought to look like.