Like I think “corporations are people too, my friend” but corporate moderation as a form of protects speech or association takes Citizens United to the next level.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/elon-musk-...
First Amendment lawyers seem mostly† to be dunking on the idea that there is anything controversial about the protection Twitter enjoys.
† maybe "entirely" is the right word here
The rationale behind regulating Twitter would be the same as the ones behind campaign finance laws: to keep a big corporation from using its power to influence elections. Except the difference is that producing a political movie is clear political speech, while the decision to delete particular items from a firehose of user generated content doesn’t seem to be expressing any message in the part of Twitter itself. As far as I can tell, the Twitterati are not addressing the implications of the “must carry” line of cases like TBS v. FCC which hold that forcing a corporation that provides a pipe for content to carry particular types of content isn’t a first amendment violation.
The Twitter internal emails confirm that folks inside Twitter weren’t treating suppression of the Hunter Biden news as a political statement on the part of Twitter. They were concerned about the potential impact on the election.
In any case, you can get online somewhere to say what you want. Use Cloudflare. The market surrounding the matter of publishing stuff online is healthy, and the nature of the internet/web is such that you can reach a global audience with relatively minor equipment.
On the consumer side, what is the argument? There is no lack of outlets, serving every niche, freely available on the same connection that delivers you Twitter. What's the problem? That people can't look away from Twitter?
It's hard to call out hypocrisy without first establishing some coherent principles. I'm not sure what those might be for any of the major political or legal factions. For example, how do we categorize and differentiate health care relationships, for when the government might want to dictate which pamphlets a provider must make available in their waiting rooms or which warnings must be placed on a label. It's roughly similar to the situation with social media companies in the sense of commercial entities mediating private relations, but I suspect a substantial number would find themselves on the opposite side of any hard line drawing.
To me this is basic 1st amendment stuff. We've gone pretty far down the road to authoritarianism when people think we need to protect the leader of the government's ability to force media companies to carry his messages.
The question is whether the government can require a platform to host otherwise legal content on politically non-discriminatory terms. Put differently, it’s about whether platform owners can use their market power over what’s essentially infrastructure to distort the country’s political debate.
Insofar as many folks on the left believe that corporations don’t have free speech rights period, it’s not “basic 1st amendment stuff.” And even for folks who think Citizens United was correctly decided, a company producing a political movie in its own name is much closer to core political speech than the moderation decisions of a user-generated content platform.
The central issue here is whether government officials can override the moderation policies of these companies.
The idea that twitter and other social media companies are just neutral platforms doesn't make any sense. Moderation and promotion of messages based on the content of the message has always been central to their business.
Also, the idea that you can just call a company "a platform" and then the government can just start directing the content of its media operations is rather alarming.
> Insofar as many folks on the left believe that corporations don’t have free speech rights period
To the extent the first amendment has anything to do with free speech anymore, they do. "The press" would have to be understood as an organization, not individual people. I don't know much about your far left people, though.
The issue isn’t neutrality, but rather expression. The First Amendment protect’s a person’s expression. It protects articles in the New York Times because those articles carry the imprimatur of the Times. When an article is published, the Times is the one speaking.
Twitter may or may not purport to be neutral, but it does not claim that the content on its platform is its own speech. Nor does it even claim that it’s moderation expresses any message from Twitter. Indeed, if they banned Trump because they hate Trump, and were willing to stand behind that position, that might well be protected speech.
But as you acknowledge, Twitter’s moderation and content promotion is just part of their business. They promote content they think users will like and moderate content they think users won’t. It’s like Google’s search results. Could the government prohibit Google from promoting its own products first and hiding the sites of its competitors in search results? Almost certainly.
> Also, the idea that you can just call a company "a platform" and then the government can just start directing the content of its media operations is rather alarming.
The difference between a “media outlet” and a “content platform” really isn’t a fine one, or at least Twitter isn’t anywhere close to the line. Is the company purporting to communicate a message? The New York Times is. CNN is. Twitter is not.
If that were true it would create a loophole so big that the first amendment would practically not exist. The President could require the New York Times to carry a daily editorial on the front page from the desk of the president, with just with an additional caveat "This editorial does not reflect the opinions of the NYT". The President could require TV stations to broadcast speeches from the president speaking in the Rose Garden.
> Could the government prohibit Google from promoting its own products first and hiding the sites of its competitors in search results? Almost certainly.
You're just pointing out that the free speech guarantees of the first amendment aren't absolute, which isn't in dispute as far as I know. It doesn't follow though, that therefore the first amendment allows the government officials to dictate any content they want to be published by media companies.
> Is the company purporting to communicate a message?
Well, when twitter adds a fact-check to a tweet, they are obviously communicating a message.
If the government is, in effect, simply hijacking a private communications medium to carry a message that's clearly from a different speaker, that's permissible. In TBS v. FCC, the Supreme Court held that cable companies can be forced to carry local channels: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/520/180/#tab-opi.... It found the burden on "cable providers editorial discretion in creating programming packages" to be insufficient to raise a first amendment problem.
Under the reasoning of TBS, Twitter has even less of a basis for claiming first amendment protection. Cable companies exercise "editorial discretion" in curating channels to fit into a limited number of available slots. Twitter doesn't need to do that and doesn't purport to do that.
> You're just pointing out that the free speech guarantees of the first amendment aren't absolute, which isn't in dispute as far as I know.
Not just that, but the guarantees are greater or less depending on the type of speech. The protection is very low for commercial speech that isn't purporting to carry any sort of message.