> First "corporate personhood" means that corporations are allowed to sue and be sued like they were individuals. Along with being taxed and regulated.
A person doing business face to face in a store cannot hide the nature of their business from their own 'customers' for lack of a better word. How long would it take the police to show up at a business that wouldn't let anyone including the people buying things from it see inside the doors or windows? Everyone could only buy things from them in the parking lot, with payment made to anonymous intermediaries, and the product delivered later by a third party. Every customer walks out holding a fake Rolex, talking about how great a store Facebook is.
See how ridiculous Facebook is when compared to the scam 'businesses' of the 80s and 90s that it emulates?
> Citizens United, the decision you are referencing did not involve this concept.
I've read the case, thanks. It equated speech with money. Individuals (only) had that right prior to it, now money has speech. Corporations are money; they hoard it and do all of the bad things that it can do with it.
> It's actually a very common sense extension of the first amendment.
Sure, if corporations can also go to prison and/or be executed. When Facebook lies to their own customers about their ad performance for the 13th month in a row, no more fines and civil suits, the board will go to prison. When a random nutjob goes and shoots up a nightclub or a school based on his political radicalization on Facebook, we'll just send the police over to arrest those same board members and management as accomplices to murder. After all, a getaway driver can be charged with a murder in a lot of US jurisdictions if the bank robber shoots the teller, and in the relationship between terrorists and victims compared to robbers and banks, Facebook is serving basically the same role as the getaway driver in the terrorist's case.
Alternatively, if Facebook refuses to hand over a board member or senior management member for prosecution in these cases we will simply 'execute' the company. Its assets will be seized and spent by the state, just like we do to the property of individual street drug dealers, for example. There's no need to convict them, just as there's no need to convict the street drug dealer. Take the money first, and if Facebook chooses to ask for it back they can hire their own legal representation and ask the courts for the money back, with their own money not the corporation's money... because they don't have that anymore.
Oh wait... corporations don't want that. They just want the rights, not the responsibilities, of personhood. They want to keep the individual indemnity.
Which is my point, in a roundabout way the decision justifies itself by becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If money is speech then money is a person, and if money is a person then money has rights, and if the whole society is based on money, then money is not only a person but the best person.