If I want to talk about Hondas on Twitter, Elon should be barred from censoring that.
If I want to talk about Bitchute on Youtube, Alphabet must allow that.
If I want to use my macbook pro to write windows software, Apple must not block it.
etc.
Why does Reddit have to host speech that it doesn’t want to? Why does anybody? Why is their right to exclude subject to limitations on the government of the United States when they are a private corporation? If the FTC wants to bring that suit, they can try, but that’s a lot to prove and I don’t think they’ll be able to count to 1, let alone 5 if they somehow make their case all the way to SCOTUS.
For the same reason that landlords have to continue housing people doing things that the landlord disagrees with. Because they took what was their private dwelling, offered it to the public as housing, and invited in a new party that has their own rights.
I don't really have a dog in the "deplatforming" fight, because I think the sooner we move to decentralized protocols the better. It's just utterly disingenuous to pretend that corporate property deliberately employed to perform services for customers is exactly the same as individually owned private property.
Social media companies don’t lose their right to exclude by having allowed you to sign up and use their services. They can still exclude you (read: ban you) pretty much at-will subject to their terms of service (so pretty much always at-will) and it’s not disingenuous to point out that yes, this is in fact their right as the owners and operators of the service.
Other service providers the facts may be different. If you have a contract with a service provider, you have a lot more in your favor under a negotiated agreement than the people that clicked “I Agree” the last time a social media company changed their TOS.
You're talking about what is currently, I'm talking about the philosophical foundations of what could be. Analogous reasoning could be applied to SaaS (Software Augmented with Arbitrary Surveillance). Even if we were to consider individual private property sacrosanct, this doesn't need to extend to corporate property employed providing public-facing services.
However these are communications platforms. So is it clear that if AT&T wanted it could say I cannot talk about my silly hats only club, they could intervene to block my communications?
Or if my landlord felt I shouldn't have a specific sign (not signs in general), or even to just say words they dont agree with, they could bar that from their property?
Or if I wanted to wear a democrat colored pair of shorts to a (business owned) pool they could bar that dress code?
These are all business contexts in which I'm using the business owners property as a customer/consumer and hypothetically being barred from an action. I dont see how it's so different for communications platforms like Reddit/FB/YT
Perhaps America is far less free than I realized.
Kind of fuzzy. Iirc, land lines no, cell phones yes, Internet yes.
> landlord
Probably extremely specific to state/county/town
> democrat shorts
Political affiliation is only a protected class in an extremely small number of areas, so most likely, yes
A telecoms company like AT&T is subject to common carrier provisions and regulation by the FCC under the Communications Act of 1934.
If a landlord wanted to prevent you from putting up signs on the property, they probably can put that in the lease agreement but their free speech interests and property interests while still dominant are compromised to an extent as well by having rented the property out to you, but not to the extent that your free speech and property interests (like your personal property) are entirely compromised either. Their ability to evict is dependent on jurisdiction, but such a case would likely turn a lot on the facts depending on the jurisdiction.
Dress codes however can be arbitrary. You can be excluded from a club because the owner doesn’t like your shoes, and yes, that’s legal. Their property interest in this case entirely trumps your free speech interest. Having strong property rights is in part why we are a free nation, but sometimes when there are clashing interests, someone’s interests are going to win out and 9/10 it will be in favor of the property owner’s interest.
There is an other problem. What you are asking for is probably going to have issues with the first amendment. This might sound weird, and you probably will feel something is off about it but as it is most often interpreted Twitter or Alphabet censoring stuff on their own platform is their right to free speech. If there would be a law like what you are asking for that would constrain their right to free speech. As you can guess it becomes complicated from there.
If you want to make the case, you have to make the case that it’s within the FTC’s wheelhouse under the statutes it is authorized to enforce. It might be anticompetitive, but if it’s not anticompetitive in a way that’s also illegal, then it’s outside the FTC’s jurisdiction. They can try it anyway under some novel legal theory or reading of the statute, but without being able to make a good case they would just be wasting everyone’s time including their own.
I agree though, a new set of laws that govern online spaces is probably needed (despite my trepidation of the current crop of legislators and their general/basic understanding of tech).
There's nothing saying you can't talk about other communities, and there is in fact an entire sub focused on "reddit alternatives" (guess the name). So for them to ban accounts for this without a clear change in rules violates that trust. But ofc coporate interests and trust are nearly parallel at this point.
Further, communications platforms are not public forums in the legal sense.
Unless, of course, you're advocating for the government to nationalize Twitter et al. That's a whole 'nother conversation.
It was never truly freedom. Classes, hierarchy, power, in the modern world order led by the US and western Europe. Fred Hampton was murdered by the racist capitalist government after the CRA passed. Before one can get to any sort of freedoms, one must not be killed by the same state bestowing such freedoms.