How do you reconcile this position with the First Amendment?
At the time the amendment was conceived, it was unimaginable to have a nation-wide entity that threatens the freedom of expression other than the government. So, it may actually be in spirit of the First Amendment to control the entities which promote and censor public discourse according to their opaque internal algorithms.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
There is nothing there that explicitly grants private enterprises the right to store, sell, and manipulate your free speech.
... because the Constitution limits the government. It doesn't grant rights to private enterprise or the people (of which private enterprise is a superset.)
Note the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which explicitly state that the rights listed in the Constitution are not exhaustive, and that all such rights not enumerated in the Constitution are granted to the states and the people.
So the right of private enterprise to store, sell and "manipulate your free speech" (which is just a bad faith framing of moderation as a violation of civil rights) is implicit to the right of free speech itself, a right which is neither defined by, and which cannot be limited by, the First Amendment to begin with.
Although yes, there are limits even within the US, those limits are usually very strictly scrutinized. Banning all major social media platforms because "They play a major role in exacerbating the divisions in the society and the rising suicide rate" on the basis that the Constitution doesn't explicitly say you can't is blatantly contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment and the whole philosophy of free speech in American law.
That’s wrong on the Ninth and Tenth: the Ninth Amendment says that enumerated rights don’t limit other rights of the people that exist (the purpose of this was that the Constitution wasn’t a “blank slate” document, there was law existing before it which established rights, and Ninth Amendment was to make clear that the Constitution did not extinguish them, it doesn’t give anything at all to states; the Tenth Amendment, which does address states, says all powers (not rights) not granted to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states or the people.
> So the right of private enterprise to store, sell and “manipulate your free speech” (which is just a bad faith framing of moderation as a violation of civil rights) is implicit to the right of free speech itself
No the right to conduct commerce that relies on doing this is not inherent in either the First Amendment nor is such conduct of commerce, insofar as it has an interstate character, protected from federal regulation by the 9th and 10th Amendments, because regulating interstate commerce is an explicit power of Congress.
Particularly since, if that were the case, porn would have been banned under that rationale ages ago. If free speech protects the likes of Larry Flynt and Vice it obviously protects Facebook and Twitter.
The authors believed in natural God-given rights. They didn't want a certain rights being legally enforceable to give moral carte blanche to everything else.
The legal applicability of the Ninth Amendment is similar to that the Preamble.
> One of the arguments the Federalists gave against the addition of a Bill of Rights, during the debates about ratification of the Constitution, was that a listing of rights could problematically enlarge the powers specified in Article One, Section 8 of the new Constitution by implication...This proposal ultimately led to the Ninth Amendment.
> Professor Laurence Tribe shares the view that this amendment does not confer substantive rights: "It is a common error, but an error nonetheless, to talk of 'ninth amendment rights.' The ninth amendment is not a source of rights as such; it is simply a rule about how to read the Constitution."
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
What's the alternative interpretation? A blank check to SCOTUS to strike down Congress citing whatever "rights" they thought of that morning?
Of course not, and thus Ninth Amendment has virtually never been cited in a (successful) court decision. For the simple reason that it doesn't state anything actually enforceable by the courts.
The business model is what would be at risk, not Facebook's free speech.