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Comment by ttybird | Hacker News Reader

I thought that the first amendment was about people rather than companies. In addition to that there are many products where companies have to display certain information, such as age rating for games, health warrnings on cigaretts, food content, allergy warning, nutrition labels, medicine side-effects, etc

It is hard to classify censorship as speech for a site that it is all about user-content.

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From a legal perspective, corporations are people too. Age ratings for games are voluntary, not legally required. The Supreme Court has held that governments can impose some limits and requirements on purely commercial speech, but those precedents don't apply to censorship decisions made by private companies. The fact that a site contains mostly user generated content is legally irrelevant.

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/900/commercial-...

I understand that some people don't like this situation but that is the reality of US federal law today. It won't change without a Constitutional amendment, or a major realignment of the Supreme Court.

It's the corporate person, distinct from a 'natural person.' Corporate persons have many but not all of the effective rights as a natural person does.

Companies are just people as far as the constitution is concerned (or really they're groups of people, but assembly is also protected by the first amendment!)

The food safety labels is an interesting point, but I'm not even talking about gov regulations here. Just, let's say Twitter deletes your post. What do you sue them for?

The 1a allows twitters employees to express themselves as they wish, even through the company, so their removal of your post is simply their own protected expression.

> I thought that the first amendment was about people rather than companies.

Any amendment written before slavery was abolished probably had a rather flexible view on the whole "people" issue. If an African American can be property then a corporation can be a person.

This discussion has nothing to do with race. You're obsessed.

> You're obsessed.

I made one comment on this and that makes me obsessed?

> This discussion has nothing to do with race.

The claim was that it applied to people, I merely mentioned that what the law considers people is a rather flexible thing.

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