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When the First Amendment was authored, I suspect people thought public property was going to be where the largest audience was, with the town hall and park and
by CM30 8y ago
When the First Amendment was authored, I suspect people thought public property was going to be where the largest audience was, with the town hall and park and square and what not being the main platform for discussion. Reaching the crowd meant going out with a handbell or standing on a box passing out pamphlets. Stopping the government from arresting someone advertising in the town square was more important than stopping a shop from kicking out a customer they didn't like.
But that's not the case now. The platforms hosting your work are privately owned, the large community websites/social networks/whatever with millions or billions of users are privately owned, and a larger portion of real life locations people frequent are privately owned too.
The way society is going seems to be making the amendment less and less relevant as time goes on.
- DanAndersen 8y ago>The way society is going seems to be making the amendment less and less relevant as time goes on. Exactly. As society moves more and more online, it moves more and more into a virtual territory that is owned at every level by corporate entities who grant no rights to their users. If we're not careful, we could end up with a strange cyber-feudal arrangement. The "it's their platform" argument seems strange to me when you start getting into the question of corporations beyond a certain size or monopoly. In the 1700s I'm sure there was a lot of arguing that certain kinds of protest were groundless because this is "the King's land." It took a re-examination of what the boundaries should be before that changed.
- betterunix2 8y agoSorry, but you seem to be confusing "the right to speak" with "the right to be heard." Your right to speak freely is not lost simply because the town square is empty and everyone is inside private clubs that will not allow you in.