These aren’t your grandfather’s liberals. That’s the 75,000-foot view of the modern Left, which has declared its primary mission to suppress disfavored free speech. Two seemingly unrelated Supreme Court cases illustrate what has become the great battle of the early 21st century.
First, The Washington Free Beacon reports, “The basic details of Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck are mundane. New York City designated Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN), a private nonprofit corporation, operator of a public access channel. Respondents DeeDee Halleck and Jesus Papoleto Melendez produced a film critical of MNN, which MNN agreed to air. The corporation subsequently removed their film and suspended the pair, claiming that they had made threats against MNN employees. Halleck and Melendez sued, claiming that MNN had violated their free speech rights under the First Amendment.”
The broader implications are interesting. Does this provide a test case for how social media is governed under the First Amendment? In other words, can Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al. silence speech because they’re private companies not subject to the First Amendment?
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DelMarVa's Premier Source for News, Opinion, Analysis, and Human Interest Contact Publisher Joe Albero at alberobutzo@wmconnect.com or 410-430-5349
2 comments:
Perhaps if they were paying subscribers for a service but free social media platforms are not free speech forums and do not care about your thoughts agendas and opinions. They don't have too that is not their revenue model. They suck you in and profile you and sell that public and sometimes personal information into advertising demographics. You may think it's just fun online keeping in touch with family and friends but your every key stroke and photo and sentence is analyzed and exploited. Your worried about Socialists and Marxists ? You have already been sucked into the very control that makes both possible.
If the platform is immune to libel laws it is in fact a free speech forum. Facebook, Google, and Youtube have protections offered to them from libel because they claim to be a sort of public utility.
If they start to censor and limit free speech they lose that libel protection and can be sued for hosting content like that. The same as newspapers. This is why newspapers can't publish everyone's thoughts that may very well be well written articles.
This is also why Youtube's recent demonetization of conservative platforms Google removing negative things about Hillary Clinton, and Facebook arbitrating what is fake news has them quickly becoming a political/private entity and the need arising in having the protections extended to those three companies exclusively, removed.
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