No private companies should be deciding the public discourse and unfortunately the most common forms of communication in today's age are all routed through private entities.
Nonsense. That's like saying that common carrier regulation [1] (e.g. requiring that railroads take all customers) is the same thing as the state imprisoning people without cause. It's the total opposite.
The state can, must, and will apply common carrier regulations to modern communication infrastructure like internet infrastructure and social media. That's not even close to state-mandated censorship.
Government says you're not allowed to ban speech on your property. Tough shit, they say, you're a public forum and no one can avoid using you. Twitter is basically the railroad! But, yes, ok you can ban "hate speech," and presumably illegal speech, like repulsive pornography.
Who decides what the hate speech is? It's not longer the platforms, their owners, or their users. Users can't leave a platform if they dislike the hate speech policy, as every other platform is homogeneously bound by government regulation to allow and disallow the same forms of speech.
The government is now in the business, by virtue of requiring no private censorship, of defining what "acceptable" speech is. What if the political environment becomes even more fraught, and one side makes the argument that the core ideology of the other side is fundamentally 'hate speech?' Worst case, they're elected with enough of a majority to start banning such speech on all private companies' platform (hopefully at this point Americans are using platforms hosted in Europe). Best case, social media is a wasteland, with one side convinced by the norms of the time that the other literally shouldn't be allow to speak - it's hate speech! Which is defined and regulated by the government! Controlled by my party!
To the point of your analogy, speech in the form of sending an HTTP post request to a private website is not the same as traveling on a railroad. The forms of traveling on a railroad while behaving horribly are well defined and easy to regulate. Ditto the carriage of information over wires for the internet - that should be a common carrier. Running a social platform is not the same as carrying unknown packets of information.
When information so carried by a common carrier is composed to make complex political speech on privately-held platforms, which are themselves expensive pieces of property which exist to make a profit, the government should back off. The platform is itself an expression of free speech and free enterprise - it is not common property, and despite the over-puffed impression of Twitter lately, it is not, by any means, the only public forum.
To stretch your analogy, this is more like the government defining what sort of conversations can be allow among the passengers of the railway.
You can spend 5 minutes on those sites to verify the claim that it’s full of hate speech.
Here on Hacker News there are complex taboos around how we may express our opinions and the type of posting that is deemed detrimental.
While it is important that the government not enforce these taboos, it is neither wrong nor necessarily evil for a society to enforce them through its use of free association - and exclusion.
Why do you think it's a given that anti-censorship common-carrier regulation would have an exception for "hate speech"? There's no constitutional precedent for that. There are specific categories of speech that the government may restriction --- slander and obscenity, for example --- and so-called "hate speech" isn't on the list. The United States has a very strong protections for free speech, even speech that offends people. Social media can, will, and must be legally required to carry everyone's speech, even when that speech is offensive.
Social media is exactly like a railroad. It's infrastructure marketed to the general public as an important part of participating in society. Unelected and unaccountable individuals in Bay Area meeting rooms do not get to unilaterally decide how the rest of the world may speak.
Do you see the breakdown here? The government cannot force private parties to associate with anyone like this, especially a controversial political figure.
You seem to misunderstand the basic sense of the first amendment.
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1594/freedom-of...
But, the government does do that... specifically that ;P. The baker won a single narrow verdict on exactly their facts, but the Supreme Court refused to say anything about anything else and AFAIK most courts are on the "you must not discriminate" side.
Can Christian Mingle require that I assert I am a Christian? Should they be allowed to ban me if I start advocating Satanism?
Your arguments apply to Twitter banning Trump - but they also apply to dang banning a poster who trolls everyone.
Also, the idea of giving politicians control over what speech must be carried on social media strikes me as stark raving mad. There is no chance that won’t be abused.
It’s also fundamentally unconstitutional. You cannot do this via legislation alone. The courts have long held that forcing someone to speak is as bad as punishing someone for speaking, and there is no constitutional framework for anything other than protected and unprotected speech. The courts will strike this bill down, it’s pure political theater for the base.
"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, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected"
The otherwise objectionable bit is basically a blank check to censor anything.
[Citation Needed]
> There would not be enforcers of this on each website but if a person's rights are violated they would be able to sue the company and a court would decide if they were censoring the person without a legitimate reason or not.
Creating a legal cause of action is a fantastic way to create a chilling effect without getting your hands dirty. This is a pretty common trick lawmakers use to try and backdoor introduce rules they can’t legally enforce themselves.
Also, the courts consider themselves to be constrained by the first amendment. You can’t endrun around that amendment by using the judiciary, which is why Times v. Sullivan was decided the way it was, even though that was a civil action between private parties.
> It would have to be done at the federal level one way or another
Doing it at the federal level is not sufficient if the courts believe that the law is unconstitutional.
> The otherwise objectionable bit is basically a blank check to censor anything.
Again, this is not censorship. You are grossly abusing that word. The moment you face legal consequences for speech, we can talk about censorship. The word you’re looking for is “moderation”.
Second, you’re tap dancing around a really big problem. It’s fine and dandy to point at 230 and say “it’s too vague”, but arguing against something is easy. You need to propose a clear alternative standard that will stand up to judicial scrutiny. You have not done that.