"Are 10 minutes of shouting out of an hour-and-a-half-long event too much? That is a matter of judgment and degree."

Said Nadine Strossen, a former head of the American Civil Liberties Union, quoted in "At Stanford Law School, the Dean Takes a Stand for Free Speech. Will It Work? After a student protest, Jenny S. Martinez wrote a much-praised memo defending academic freedom. But that protest shows how complicated protecting free speech can be" (NYT).

If you get the balance wrong, Ms. Strossen said, then you risk chilling speech on the other side....

Ms. Strossen said she was struck that [a week later, when she appeared on a panel at Yale], there were no protesters of any kind. “I worry that maybe the reason that there weren’t even nondisruptive protests,” she said, “is students were too afraid that they would be subject to discipline or doxxing.” 

Strossen spoke at Stanford in January, a guest of the Federalist Society. That was 2 months before the famously disrupted visit by Judge Kyle Duncan. Strossen says that Tirien Steinbach, the associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion — widely criticized for her handling of the Duncan event — moderated her event. According to Strossen, "That took some courage." It was "extraordinary."

Pause a moment to absorb that.

"In some ways, I believe that these tech giants are more powerful than government officials.... take Donald Trump versus Mark Zuckerberg. Trump could be dis-elected..."

"... he could be sued, he can be impeached. And none of the above is true for Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, etc, no free speech rights against them, no due process rights against them. And... we've seen more and more of a coalescence between particular political and government leaders, putting increasingly overt pressure on the tech companies to censor speech that these politicians don't like and that they would be completely barred by the First Amendment from directly censoring themselves.... So from from a legal perspective... whether you call it collaboration or pressure, the interrelationship between the two is constitutionally significant, because even private sector actors are directly bound by constitutional norms, including the First Amendment free speech guarantee, if you can show that there is in the legal term to describe this is called entanglement, sufficient entanglement between the government officials and the nominally private sector actors, that if they are essentially conspiring with the government doing the government's bidding, the government can't do an end run around his own constitutional obligations that way.... And I have to say, you know, you talk about certain orthodoxies on the left, I was really shocked at how cavalier and how dismissive the so-called mainstream media was in sneering at Trump's lawsuit, because it really has to be taken seriously.... there is a serious First Amendment challenge here...."

From "Interview with Nadine Strossen on Threat of Big Tech and Big Gov Collusion Against the First Amendment/'Private sector actors are directly bound by constitutional norms, including the First Amendment' if they are being coerced or colluding with the government" (interview with Sam Husseini on Substack).

Nadine Strossen, a law professor, was president of the ACLU from 1991 to 2008.