Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor,Threatening First Amendment

First five words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law...”

It’s pretty unambiguous. The United States doesn’t make laws without Congress[1], and if Congress can’t make a law, the President’s Office can’t enforce it.

That however is not as big a limit on Congress as it seems. Congress can make other difficult and tedious laws, and difficult and tedious describes most of the body of Federal law. Congressmen can also threaten to remove statutes which shield people and organizations from liability as a coercive tactic, e.g. Section 230, or write into law that they will withhold Federal funds to States that don’t pass certain laws.

Why can they do this? Two reasons really. A legal body like SCOTUS is in no position to tell a political body like Congress that they cannot. If Congress passes a law that violates the Constitution, Article III courts can strike it down or gut it in court proceedings, but with no law in play and no harmed party there is nothing for the courts to do. Nor can an Article III court stop Congress from passing a law nor remedy a harm by forcing Congress to reinstate a repealed law. The process of lawmaking is impervious to the Courts.

Also, and more importantly: Article I. The House and Senate make their own rules and are charged with enforcing them on their members. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making certain laws, laws they arguably didn’t have the power to make in Article I in the first place. It doesn’t say a damn thing about the political process of lawmaking, or the conduct of House members and Senators nor prohibit them from using hardball tactics for their own interests or the perceived interests of their constituents and political allies. There are people that would actually like to see Section 230 burn, and if that’s the case, gutting and removing it makes it fair game for politicking.

If the House and Senate as a body are making an attempt to coerce large companies to political ends, there is no one to tell them “No.” except voters, and only through elections. If they had any inkling at all that they were going to receive sufficient pushback from voters as to threaten their seats, these meetings wouldn’t be happening.

The Federal government is the most powerful organization in the United States by far and second place ain’t even close. Congress legally sits atop the governmental hierarchy even when politically they like to play second fiddle to the President. Congress can coerce a lot of people with little to no pushback so long as the targets of coercion are also unpopular, or at the very least, voters are ambivalent towards them.

[1] Another important point. A State is not the United States. Congress is the legislative branch of the United States. Don’t comment to incorrect me on this point.

Greenwald may be opposed to censorship on principle, and doesn't think the government should be interfering in any way with Facebook's operations. But it seems like he's let that color his understanding of how government actually works.

What I find truly concerning about the present circumstances is that there are attempts to frame it is something other than government censorship and should thus undergo less or even no scrutiny. And on the other side that these organizations should be compelled to carry speech as if that were "protecting freedom" rather than just another form of government abridgement of speech and thus should undergo less or even no scrutiny. In my opinion, it is our duty as a society to not be wishy-washy about this and recognize that any attempts by the government to influence speech, either directly or indirectly, are government censorship and we must tackle this head on and come to decision whether we think the harm to society is worse than the sacrifice of our freedoms.

I think you may have overstated your case, because I doubt you are opposed to anti-discrimination laws that require companies to employ people regardless of their religious views. For example, companies are forced to allow Muslims to wear head coverings at work. I doubt you are opposed to that.

An interesting question in America now is whether political views should be protected as civil rights just like religious views. That would protect people from being fired from their jobs or banned from private places because of their political views.

For those who oppose that idea: how is religion so different from politics?

The right fix is to split them up with revised and enforced antitrust law. And where they can’t be split up they should be regulated or nationalized so that they uphold the first amendment. After all, they operate the new digital public town square and the fact that the government has outsourced our spaces for speech to private industry shouldn’t mean that we suddenly lose our fundamental rights.

There's a difference between a demagogue and an individual who threatens or assaults another. Nobody is arguing the latter is not a criminal.

But for the former, what I've often observed is that demagogues are very good at dog-whistling; they're adept at finding the razor's edge between dog-whistling and outright calls to violence. They're also great at spinning any perceived censorship into proof of their righteous "dissent" which plays right into their hand.

So to come back to the statement you made, presumably in exaggeration -- yes, we do have to allow people to lie if we want free speech. The destructive viral effect of such lies can only be addressed scalably with some kind of an immune system.

You cannot solve societal or cultural problems with legislation. Then you will have two problems. Solving the root of America's problem with demagoguery requires solving the root. That is very tricky considering America's history as the world's police force. These aren't problems that can be fixed in a generation even when there is a common desire to fix them.

1. The alternative, censorship, is worse when it inevitably is turned against you.

2. Even if censorship is better, it violates individual rights, which are sacred and cannot be abridged except in a narrow range of cases.

It is possible that people with viewpoints that differ from your own are not “wrong”, they just have different values.

Yes, rights are not up for a vote or negotiation, and the existence of bad actors does nothing to negate my rights.