Facebook is not a person. Facebook should not have "rights" nor "political views".
The silly idea of treating companies like persons and giving them any "rights" at all is what got us into this mess in the first place.
Facebook is not a person. Facebook should not have "rights" nor "political views".
The silly idea of treating companies like persons and giving them any "rights" at all is what got us into this mess in the first place.
In the USA, the supreme court has ruled a corporation DOES in fact have rights. Like the lawsuit of advertising medicine that a state banned-- the SC ruled that was infringing the rights of corporations to "express" their speech.
As someone from UK, I find this whole "Corporations have more rights than I do" very disturbing but thats how it is
If companies as a legal concept didn't exist in their current form, then we wouldn't have this problem of one person, or more commonly many people, using them as a proxy to get away with a bunch of unethical stuff. Often way more unethical that whatever Facebook / Zuck is doing, such as destroying ecosystems, prioritizing profits over worker safety, etc.
But yes, I'd like to see the board of Facebook and the boards of many other companies being held liable for the actions of those companies. But for some reason, it's only ever "expedient" to grant companies the rights rightfully belonging to people, and never "expedient" to impose the same sorts of liabilities on them as on people. (Not that a non-physical entity such as a company could ever practically face the same penalties as a physical person anyway, which is another ("obvious" in your parlance) reason not to grant them those rights.)
If I was interested in going down the ad-hominem route I'd claim that you simply see the status quo as "obvious" because you lack the power of imagination to consider a more sensible alternative.
In fact, I think your argument is so backwards it actually supports my case. Why do I need to "imagine" that the owners of the company are using their rights to free speech as individuals (which is obviously not what is actually happening)? Why can't they just actually use those individual rights?
You don't like a trawling boat emptying out the lake in your village? Just imagine that the boat's captain is using a fishing rod to do the same, that's clearly a comparable situation!