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I am not a lawyer and not well versed in this case. But my 2 cents:
- This case does NOT necessarily appear to be about whether individuals' FIRST AMENDMENT rights were violated, or about whether individuals have a FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT to express themselves on the social media platforms of private companies.
- Instead, this case DOES seem to be about in what capacity a STATE is allowed to REGULATE private companies operating WITHIN THAT STATE.
It might seem somewhat paradoxical, and my guess is that is because the issue is nuanced but not overly so. The STATES are introducing MORE REGULATION of companies, in order to help ensure MORE FREEDOM of individuals. This can be painted as "more onerous" or "less free", but that view may depend on who you are (e.g., if you hardline siding with corporations, or if you hardline side with less regulation, even if that particular regulation in fact requires less regulation by companies of individual flesh and blood humans). (This might also be painted as "more free", in terms of the STATE'S RIGHT to regulate.)
In theory, some states could "regulate and enforce" that companies must follow certain rules. In general, the states have broad latitude in making rules that are left up to them, and that are not really the main concern of the federal government.
If the courts were to consider or decide whether there are in fact more FIRST AMENDMENT FREEDOMS FOR INDIVIDUALS (NOT COMPANIES) in relation to social media, that would be huge but I think pretty unlikely at this time at least. But hey, big changes can always happen seemingly out of nowhere or too fast for some.
They may spend money in political campaigns. They may hold religious beliefs.
Do they not also have first amendment rights? Or put differently: are we not men?
Or are you referring to a common interpretation, typically of language that is absent from the Constitution?
>Or are you referring to a common interpretation, typically of language that is absent from the Constitution?
Not GP, but there is text that says this -- no interpretation required:
"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."[0]
And
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. "[1][2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
[2] [1] above is included as it extends [0] to apply to state and local governments as well as Congress.
> Private companies can't violate an individual's First Amendment rights. Only governments can.
Which part of the quoted text supports this claim? Answer: none of it. Interpretation: since it doesn't mention private companies in this context, private companies and the first amendment are not connected, and the former cannot violate someone's rights under the latter. Not an unreasonable interpretation, but not found in the text.
"Congress shall make no law..." And that extended to the states by the 14th Amendment.
Passing a law forcing someone (or a group of "someones", which is what a corporation is) to host/amplify speech they don't wish to host/amplify is "abridging free speech" and is explicitly forbidden by the First Amendment.
No interpretation required.
The original claim here was a corporation cannot infringe first amendment rights.
That was followed by the claim that this is actually in the Constitution.
But the constitution does not say this. It says (if you go with the corporations-are-people-with-first-amendment-rights interpretation) that the government may not abridge the first amendment rights of corporations (and, usually the accompanying implicit coda, nor the rights of individuals using technology provided by corporations).
Yes, because the first amendment is explicitly about rights protecting you from the government.
If a law says "the government can't do X to you", then nothing individuals or corporations do can violate that law. Obviously. I'm not sure why this is difficult to grasp.
"Precedent" would imply that this is merely the interpretation of earlier courts, but no, the first amendment is quite explicit about what the rights therein are protecting you from, and it's not private groups.
Other individuals and corporations have many rights with respect to other individuals and corporations that are not shared with the government.
In this particular aspect, the government cannot abridge your right to free speech, but this is widely understood as referring only to free speech essentially controlled by government (i.e. public contexts). I am (relatively) free to limit your "free speech" in my magazine or blog or youtube channel.
Part of the question before the court is the extent to which social media is closer to a government controlled space or context or a private publication.
Agreed, and those are written in things other than the First Amendment.
What were we discussing, again?
> Part of the question before the court is the extent to which social media is closer to a government controlled space or context or a private publication.
Which is patently absurd. There are some grey areas for the First Amendment, but "is a private corporation actually the government?" isn't one of them. That's extremely black and white. Republicans arguing otherwise just don't like that some corporations have at least attempted to moderate hateful speech and misinformation.
Now, maybe if tech platforms had been granted a monopoly by the government, like some utilities, then sure, but that's not the case here.
Whether (a) corporations can interfere with individual free speech (b) the constitution contains actual text that says so (one way or another)
Some GGGP or something claims that
> Private companies can't violate an individual's First Amendment rights. Only governments can.
to which a child comment claims
> It's not just precedent, it's written into the Constitution.
Imagine this as the other extreme. Apple starts censoring your sentences at the keyboard level. How would you feel then?
Just trying to say there are some interesting perspectives here.
Based on what bar? Because they're popular services?
But why should that matter? There absolutely are a bunch of competitors available. And there's no "is a popular forum" exception in the first amendment that I've seen, people just seem to be making up this idea out of whole cloth.
And the government could start its own online public forum if it wanted. If Texas and Florida feel this way, why don't they make their own truly public message board or social networking site that's free of censorship?
As for the government starting its own public forum, it would meet the same fate as every other big tech competitor. I wouldn't be surprised if they got bought out.
There is nothing in the Constitution about a "de facto public square". The first amendment concerns how the government can manage speech, and Facebook isn't the government, no matter how popular they are.
If you want to make a legal argument, it needs to be grounded in reality, not something you just made up.
Now if you want to argue that the current situation is fucked up and unhealthy for a society, sure, I'd probably agree. But that's not the same topic. The topic is whether these laws are Constitutional, and they very clearly are not.
Personally, I think having a government Twitter as a "digital public square of last resort" is fine as a solution, as long as it has no curation abilities whatsoever: no recommended pages, no default feed or algorithmic timeline, not even a search function. Any pages you get to come via external links, or internal links placed manually by whichever page you're looking at.
This way, you avoid any issue of bias, and while there may be Nazi pages somewhere there, you wouldn't be able to get to them except by getting linked elsewhere to Nazis, it wouldn't be the platform actually recommending Nazis to you (because it wouldn't recommend anything).
That section says: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
We're in this weird place where social media platforms want to claim that it's their speech in some cases, and not their speech in other cases, and that just seems unfair.
This has been resolved in the past by phone companies and similar platforms being declared common carriers - and that's true even if there are a bunch of competitors available. Why shouldn't that be true of social media platforms?
* Absolutely censoring nothing is an insane position to take. Even just spammers would flood such a site, let alone super extreme people like outright Nazis or KKK members. The typical person would have no interest in sharing a website with people like that, and they would flee. Very few people want to be posting on 4chan (and IIRC even 4chan has some moderation these days, underscoring the point).
* On the other hand, you can't realistically expect a company to take full responsibility for every piece of user generated content immediately. There's no way to do this well at scale, other than to use algorithms to get rid of what seems like the worst stuff, and deal with the grey areas when users submit reports of bad behavior. It's not feasible for a site that lets users upload random things, resulting in millions of pieces of new content daily, to manually approve every single one.
But there's a lot of keyboard manufacturers out there, I think many people would buy a different keyboard if the one they had did not serve the purpose they intended it for.
I don't think anything is really a common carrier unless they are or have been granted a monopoly or oligopoly over limited public resources.
There is a very extreme difference between the ability to choose an iPhone, and being able to choose which wires are on the pole in front of your house.
Common carriers are required to provide service under a special set of terms, in exchange for special and preferential treatment, like having exclusive access to public resources. That's not the case with a mobile phone, virtual keyboard, or OS. If you want to make one, go make one.
Vindicated by my choice of operating system.
But seriously, "what if <company> did monumentally stupid thing for their business?" can be asked about many sorts of things. What if Apple decides to only support Dvorak keyboards? What if Apple gets rid of all of their game-specific graphics APIs? What if Apple triples their prices overnight? Which of these should the government categorically ban businesses from doing?
The conventional answer within contemporary (say, post-1950) US capitalism is: nothing, unless they are a monopoly.
I don't agree with this assessment, but it has many believers and even a few arguments on its side.
If Apple wants to stupidly censor people at the keyboard level and thus incite everyone to switch to Windows or Linux (or Android), well that's dumb, but doing dumb things shouldn't be generally illegal.