11th Circuit upholds the block on Florida's social media 'censorship' law | Hacker News Reader

11th Circuit upholds the block on Florida's social media 'censorship' law

protocol.com

9 pointsperihelions4 comments

How I wish that there were something in the Bill of Rights that said "these rights are for INDIVIDUALS only, and not collective legal entities." It's up there with getting election day off as a holiday for things that should happen, but don't because the powers that be WANT the system rigged in that way.

this is much more complicated than it seems. To a large extent, there's no meaningful difference between "a corporation using its power" and "a group of like-minded people getting together to amplify their voices"

Well, there's a big difference, because we grant special limited-liability status to corporations -- but the big tech platforms don't really benefit that much from limited-liability because the corporations have more wealth than their owners/officers anyway (and virtually all of the wealth of the owners/officers is in their ownership stake anyway)

The distinction is the legal entity. If an individual speaks, and has liability for that speech, it is entirely different from if an individual speaks, but only as a representative for a company, union, etc... This is simple and easy to enforce, but would give a huge advantage to individuals and small privately held business over large corporations in terms of rights, while corporations would benefit from scale and limited liability. As it stand, large companies get ALL the perks and none of the costs, and effectively have MORE rights than individuals.

We accept that governments can compel companies to be honest in their advertisements, and to include safety warnings and ingredients lists, in order that consumers in the marketplace can make informed decisions.

For democracy to function, we need political messages to compete in the marketplace of ideas, so it doesn't seem like completely uncharted territory for legislation to say that companies are merely forbidden to delete purely political comments for purely partisan reasons.

That actually seems like a much more modest interference with corporate speech than requiring companies to actively add text to their ads and packaging.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com