The first amendment does not protect you against anything but the government. Full stop. Between people and people, corporations and corporations, and corporations and people it does nothing.
The opinion fails at this very basic fact because they want it to be false. Not because there's any law suggesting it is false, nor has there been in a hundred years, but because they dont like it they just decided to make it up.
The states do not get to change this. If you want something else pass an amendment, don't try to get a bunch of crazy unqualified judges to make a mess.
> Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.
That decision does not dispute what you quoted at all. That case is not even about the first amendment, it is based on California’s state constitution. In fact your link makes the exact claim as the one you say is false.
> the federal constitution's First Amendment contains only a negative command to Congress to not abridge the freedom of speech
Touché! But the bit I quoted is something of a non sequitur as this case, like PruneYard, concerns a state law extending additional speech protections into the private sector, so PruneYard does seem relevant, as PruneYard affirmed a state’s ability to do this. Further, it doesn’t seem much rebuttal of this ruling about a state law to argue the First Amendment offers no protection to those censored by Facebook (as the part I quoted was doing). The First Amendment enters the case in terms of whether it protects Facebook from this law, not whether it protects users from censorship corporate censorship.
What personal consequences do you think should come to federal officials who explicitly requested social media companies to censor specific people and certain categories of speech?
So a Linux User Group cannot kick out someone that's espousing neo-nazi viewpoints during meetings because they're a facilitator of them speaking to you, and because neo-nazism is a political viewpoint?
Anti-speech pro-corporate-authority advocates always try to put these monopolistic, unescapable megacorporations in the same category as some local mom-and-pop operation. It's a massive intentional category error; megacorps are not little companies you can just walk awawy from. There is a point where a corporation's influence becomes so unescapable and so capable of greatly degrading your life that it must be treated in some ways like a government, for the same reasons we treat government differently from just another company or citizen.
The same reason that the phone company or a company that owns all the local roads or water mains can't decide to "stop serving" you because they don't like your religion.
>The same reason that the phone company or a company that owns all the local roads or water mains can't decide to "stop serving" you because they don't like your religion
Because it's hard to impossible to get alternate services for roads, water and electricity, i.e common carriers. But there are plenty of neo nazi forums, Gab, Truth Social, Parler, 4chan for racists to express and spread their views.
There already are common carriers for communication, see email services.
These are unmoderated, just spam filtered. Forums, social sites and video sharing sites are typically not one of these, and the distinction is important. The most important distinct piece is ownership. Shen you signed the Terms of Service with say YouTube, you granted them rights that vastly exceed ones a common carrier has.
Email is not carrier and is not regulated as such. I can create a private mail server, invite users and keep any email from being delivered that I so choose.
Ridiculous idea. Sure, you can run your own private email server... and watch as your messages go to everyone else's spam. It does not matter what SPV, DMARC bullshit hoop you jump through. Ultimately google gets to decide what email providers live and what email providers die.
It is analogous to creating your own postal service or phone company that only lets you send letters to users of the same postal service or phone company. The service is only useful due to network effects.
But it actually is almost impossible to truly start your own phone company, in terms of running wires to people's homes or putting up towers. The capital expenditures and regulatory hurdles are near impossible, save for extremely well financed and well connected people.
I've had SMTP servers which have extremely high deliverability rates hosted for <$100/mo for over a decade.
The capital expenditures are nowhere near comparable. The regulatory burdens are nowhere near comparable.
Email providers are not common carriers. Its very easy to just sign up for a different email provider. Its easy to buy a domain name and update MX records across literally hundreds of commercial providers eager to have your business. And even if every single host bans you (you really should then question what you're doing if nobody wants your business) its still technically possible to go it on your own. And once again, as long as you're not being generally abusive its possible to have good success.
Comparing getting banned from Gmail might as well be the same as comparing getting banned from McDonalds. McDonalds isn't a common carrier no matter how much you like Big Macs. There's plenty of other restaurants available.
"Because it's hard to impossible to get alternate services for roads, water and electricity, i.e common carriers."
You are omitting telephone service, which is also a common carrier despite being arguably more competitive than the Big 3 cloud providers.
That's where I personally would come down. This decision is ridiculous; social media companies are highly competitive. But I am much, much less comfortable with AWS kicking off Parler.
Those places should allegedly be held to the same standards in suppression of speech. Only they don’t have numbers to withstand the destruction of their platform if, say, numerous other people suddenly showed up to disagree with them.
Facebook doesn't own all the local roads or water mains though. They're one website. It's just as easy to go to twitter.com as it is truthsocial.com or mastodon.social.
If Comcast owned practically the only ISP in my area then yes they should be considered a common carrier and shouldn't be able to discriminate traffic that isn't trying to break their stuff. In that case they would be the company that owns the roads or the water mains. Facebook isn't like that in the slightest.
Facebook, Twitter, etc. are not even close to inescapable. It's remarkably easy to leave those sites for one of the hundreds of other social media sites out there. We're using a nice one right now.
Yes. A handful of megacorps acting together (and they all act together generally) can take away your property by banning you, which makes it impossible to have a normal career in fields as diverse as academia, creative media, journalism, tech, and many others. If you're running a small business and trying to promote it, being banned from social media is a huge hit as well.
They already have taken away your liberty to speak your mind in the common public square of our society - social media - because you know they'll ban you if you say any of a wide variety of things, leading to the consequences described above.
The common public square is just that - paid for and maintained with public money.
Trump doesn’t seem to have any issue getting his message out or getting people to come to his rallies.
Before the internet existed, the entire civil rights movement was organized by leaders going to churches - even though the locations were actively being bombed, leaders were being arrested, water hosed, lynched, bitten by police dogs, etc.
Cry me a river that some conservatives can’t post on Twitter.
Okay, but how are they “inescapable”? I hear this argument a lot, but no one can seem to dot that very important i.
If I can’t use Facebook, I can use Reddit. If I can’t use YouTube, I can use Vimeo. If I can’t use Instagram, I can use TikTok or Snapchat. If conservatives get banned from Twitter, there’s a bevy of conservative-leaning Twitter clones. Plus Mastodon, which you can’t get banned from because you can just set up your own instance.
> The Texas law forbids social media companies with at least 50 million monthly active users from acting to "censor" users based on "viewpoint," and allows either users or the Texas attorney general to sue to enforce the law.
> This chapter applies only to a social media platform that functionally has more than 50 million active users in the United States in a calendar month.
By some readings of section 230, they may not be able to unless they want to be treated as a publisher of speech. However, almost nobody is going to actually argue that this is the case.
Also, IIRC moderation rules are allowed, and if your rule is "no politics on the forum" and someone talks politics, they can be banned. Same with "no racism" or "no antisemitic comments."
No, only by a reading of a made up text that some people wish was in section 230. If you're bringing it up I'm sure you've had pointed out before that there is no publisher/platform distinction in it.
> Also, IIRC moderation rules are allowed, and if your rule is "no politics on the forum" and someone talks politics, they can be banned.
The first person you ban is going to argue with you about the definition of "politics". So many people have been through this idea before, and it always leads right back to "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone".
It turns out that there actually are several subjects that are pretty well defined to be "politics," and there are lots of subjects of conversation that are definitely not "politics." There is a gray area, and as a forum moderator you can choose where the line is as long as you apply the rule consistently. Most of the discussion about this right now is about the consistent application of those rules: people point out one side getting moderated more heavily on certain forums than the other side.
Section 230 (c) 3. Seems pretty clear that they can moderate for anything the provider finds objectionable.
Do you think this is unclear?
> No provider or user of an interactive com-
puter service shall be held liable on account
of—
> (A) any action voluntarily taken in good
faith to restrict access to or availability of
material that the provider or user considers
to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, exces-
sively violent, harassing, or otherwise objec-
tionable, whether or not such material is
constitutionally protected;
I think the argument is that "good faith" necessarily doesn't hold when you allow one group of people to post threats, harassing content, and misinformation while you ban another group from doing the same thing. In other words, selective enforcement to favor your friends doesn't seem to be particularly good faith. I'll leave you to decide which platforms to investigate and to find selective enforcement: all of them do it.
To be clear, I don't agree with those interpretations of section 230 - and neither do many judges.
I'm not sure telephone companies or shipping services are a good analogy here, though, yes, that's an example the opinion uses. One key difference is that telephones are generally one to one or one to few communications, whereas social media platforms are a megaphone to speak to many people? Do other forms of mass communication require you deliver any and all speech?
If you're going to say social media is like a telephone, I think you have to at least consider in what ways it actually isn't like a telephone.
That's not why people write on social media. There are very many "telephone wires" that have nobody listening on the other side. What every contributor is after is the audience. But there is no legal right to an audience.
That strikes me as a pretty clear distinction.
My hair is not blown back at all here.