Berenson faces a “very high bar” in proving that a private company behaved as a state actor, Evelyn Douek, an Atlantic contributor and assistant professor at Stanford Law School, told me. According to both her and Goldman, the Slack messages that Berenson published don’t amount to proof that the government pressured Twitter to remove Berenson’s account. But Douek is generally perturbed by the evidence of informal pressure by government officials to constrain speech. “It does strike me as unusual,” she said. “It’s certainly unusual to get records of it.”