Judge tears Florida’s social media law to shreds for violating First Amendment
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Tells you all you need to know about this law.
Would be neat to have attractions like Google Drive Bumper Cars.
Yes, a corporation isn't a person per se, but it is a group of people. To decide which websites have free speech rights and which do not based on their organizational or tax structure is both arbitrary and unfair.
Also, please don't be disingenuous, it is entirely feasible and reasonable to legally distinguish between a blog with 10 monthly visitors, and a corporation with 100 million monthly visitors.
I won't claim to be smarter than you, but I will attempt to provide some justification for your assertion that "corporations need constitutional rights" is a fallacy.
Firstly, the idea of corporate personhood is a much later invention than the US Constitution itself, and seems to have developed almost by accident.[0] But regardless of its provenance, it is still clear that a natural person and a corporate "person" are two legally distinct classes of entity. To pick a trivial example, corporations are not entitled to vote (or be counted towards congressional representation).
More generally, corporations are not inherent features of the world, but rather legal fictions which exist at the discretion of the society that chooses to grant them existence. A society could, for example, require that all corporations be dissolved, without bumping into the constitutional issues that would arise if such a law was applied to natural persons...
Anyway, it seems to me that the argument for protecting "corporate speech" (such as the ACLU's support of Citizens United[1]) is that as long as corporations exist and are useful vehicles for natural persons to exercise their constitutional right to free speech, then the government can't help but infringe on the First Amendment by targeting that "corporate speech". To say that corporations need constitutional rights is to get the argument exactly backwards.
Instead, the government should put a positive duty onto social media to protect freedom of speech, by forbidding terms of service which ban users based on their (legal) political opinions. Such a regulation need only apply to platforms which are of a size where they are likely to have a disproportionate effect on the national political discourse.
This is not too far removed from existing First Amendment jurisprudence which does allow the government to force health warnings and correct labelling onto products. In fact I would say that a website shouldn't be able to present itself as "social media" if it systematically excludes views that are popular in that society, so the analogy to labelling laws isn't that much of a stretch.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#In_the_Un...
perhaps free speech should fall back to what it used to be, you can say anything except illegal forms, and then platforms can remove only those illegal forms, la a NAP [1] for speech itself
Platforms owning the world's communications but not being subject to aspects in the constitution to protect citizens rights, isn't something that should be considered sustainable, a good read in this, which probably wouldn't fly today, is Marsh vs Alabama [2]
The government fell behind in the digital era, there is no public sidewalks on the internet, no public buildings, etc. The concept of free speech, is not protected on the biggest, most popular, communication medium. Why even have free speech at this point, except for perversion by corporations-pretending-to-have-citizen-rights
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Please observe the first word of the first amendment, "Congress." That means any legislative body: federal, state, or municipal. It does not mean any individual, corporation, or content provider. Furthermore, moderation is not censorship. It has been established that free speech is available to everyone and that moderating a given medium from content it considers objectionable, illegal, or contrary to its means or goals is de facto free speech. To suggest otherwise is counter to the idea that the first amendment was founded on. Not only to prevent monarchs, dictators and governments from suppressing speech but to also prevent monarchs, dictators and governments from forcing government dictated propaganda.
Control is control.
Actually, technically it doesn’t. At the time of the writing, the Bill of Rights only applied to the Federal Government and not the states.
There were later court cases that expanded many of the rights to also include the state governments.
Thus, we already have precedent for expanding two the First Amendment applies to: Originally it was Congress, and not it is even Municipal governments.
An argument can be made that the power of say Facebook exceeds that of a municipal government to whom the First Amendment applies, and that a Facebook ban is far more chilling than what a small town mayor censoring stuff.
The exact placement of letters and punctuation has generally taken a back seat to the "spirit" of the constitution.
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As to the reason I referenced marsh v alabama,
> The court pointed out that the more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.
The rights of a citizen to speak freely on a sidewalk do not go away because the government stops owning sidewalks
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And I'm pro-moderation, I said as much. I just believe the rules for moderation should be government dictate, not arbitrary company dictate
Furthermore, government dictated moderation is de facto censorship, not the other way around.
The argument was based on the Marsh v Alabama ruling but the justices did not agree. That's why we're allowed to have spam filters. Are you pro or anti spam filter, because by your definition of the law, spam filters are illegal.
Marsh would sooner apply to social media than to email, it does not magically have to apply to both or neither.
* http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?Mode=Constitut...
https://www.cpr.org/2021/06/17/masterpiece-cakeshop-transgen...
Whether that philosophical difference matters in the eyes of the law is another question, and I'm glad I'm not the one who has to interpret it.
You're not entitled to have platforms carry and amplify your speech, if they believe it's harmful to their other customers. Just like your ISP isn't required to provide you service if they know you're controlling a botnet. And your phone company can cut you off if they find out you're running an unauthorized robocalling operation.
If the sidewalk concept stops at the network layer, then free speech stops at being able to make a VOIP call, not very useful to the concept of free speech at all
To hold a sign up that has my message, one to many over a time period (stateful), is application layer, IMO
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> You're not entitled to have platforms carry and amplify your speech, if they believe it's harmful to their other customers.
Hence why I referenced the NAP
Or host a web server, or IRC server, or seed a torrent, or a million other things. You can "hold up a sign" that has your message on all of these mediums.
And most ISPs don't "allow" home hosting on personal plans, so you have to pay extra, hosting on any other platform once again subjects you to extra rules to restrict your speech, etc etc. for something that is the right of every citizen, and needs to be in the reach of every citizen. This is not a good approach IMO
Buy DDoS protection. Maybe put DDoS protection providers under the umbrella of net neutrality.
> most ISPs don't "allow" home hosting on personal plans, so you have to pay extra
And? If you want to stand on the sidewalk with a sign, you have to buy some cardboard. If you want to hand out leaflets, you need a printing press or a laser printer. Seeding a torrent is free, as is shouting at the top of your lungs on a sidewalk (and with the latter, you may be busted for "breach of peace" or some BS like that).
> hosting on any other platform once again subjects you to extra rules to restrict your speech
That's kinda the point. If you host your own platform, such as a PhpBB board, you get to make your own rules.
You've pointed me to the NAP, but from a libertarian point of view I don't see any argument to allow someone to use my property against my will - even if it's to exercise their "free speech". It's not free for me.
Even were one to accept that, it is an argument for net neutrality, not compelled carry of content to providers on the application layer.
I disagree with the claim that currently any one provider of the type typically characterized as a platform is sufficiently dominant in information control in any scope other for their control of their platform content to be equivalent to state censorship, and the argument for limiting their First Amendment rights is consistently that they don't sufficiently represent a viewpoint preferred by the government officials pushing to curtail their liberty. This isn’t government acting to restore free speech, is government acting to promote a partisan viewpoint by curtailing freedom of speech.
This law is wrong and unconstitutional for the same reason forcing students to say the pledge of allegiance is wrong and unconstitutional.
Free speech has literally never been that.