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For clarification: The 1st amendment ensures that the government may not stop you from saying what you want. This is a separate issue from private companies r

For clarification: The 1st amendment ensures that the government may not stop you from saying what you want. This is a separate issue from private companies removing/banning you. Each company has their own right and freedom to be as dickish as they want with regard to deleting your account etc - but that is not related to the 1st.

bluesign 6y ago
Yeah but if they have this freedom (being dickish etc) then they should also be responsible for what they are publishing on their platforms. They want to have their cake and eat it.
s17n 6y ago
"Freedom of press" can and should be interpreted to proscribe deplatforming by the big tech companies.
aidenn0 6y ago
It used to be true that companies could be dickish to you, but now thanks to the 13th amendment (and the courts interpretation thereof), there are specific ways that they cannot be dickish to you. Either way you are right that it's not related to the 1st amendment though.
ravenstine 6y ago
No, it isn't. There's already precedents for what businesses can and cannot prevent you from doing. If, for instance, you think a business should be compelled to bake a cake with a certain message on it, then you can't make the argument that there should be no regulation on how much a business can censor its users. That's not the only example. There's extensive case law that establishes how both governments and businesses have to either allow or curtail speech under certain conditions. A business can't legally compel you to do say something or wear a piece of clothing in a way that discriminates against you. A sex shop can't just open anywhere because, while it's been argued that they should be allowed as a form of free expression, they tend not to be considered as such under the spirit of the law. A person can be held responsible for the aftermath of shouting "fire" in a crowded room, even though this speech is superficially supported by the first amendment. Point being, we make decisions about freedom of speech that don't necessarily follow the letter of the constitution or stay within the bounds of the government. Freedom of speech isn't just a law. It's a social principle upon which America was founded. If all meaningful communication is dominated by too-big-to-fail businesses with AI that can scour all correspondence, a reality we are rapidly approaching, then freedom of speech becomes meaningless. The situation becomes worse when these companies are all politically aligned with the regime. This is why we can't ignore how private companies regulate communication through their systems.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  There's a difference between you saying what you want on the cake (if they had self-service), and the biz having to write what you want written. That said, agreed. Big Tech and Fed Govs working in concert is not a positive. Anyone cheering on FAANG's recent decisions is naive.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Big Tech and Fed Govs working in concert is not a positive. Anyone cheering on FAANG’s recent decisions is naive. FAANG’s recent decisions are directly against the head of the Federal Government, not taken in concert with “Fed Govs”.
    - chiefalchemist 6y ago
      For what, two more weeks? And that head is only 1/3 of the gov. FAANG is siding with the other two.
- fabianhjr 6y ago
  > a business should be compelled to bake a cake with a certain message on it That is a misrepresentation of the case: > Craig and Mullins filed a complaint to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission under the state's public accommodations law, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, which prohibits businesses open to the public from discriminating against their customers on the basis of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. The complain was under a _state law_ specifically to address sexual orientation discrimination and it has been acknowledged that such law doesn't force a business to make cakes with arbitrary messages. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado_Civil_Rights_Commission https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado... That said: > If all meaningful communication is dominated by too-big-to-fail businesses with AI that can scour all correspondence, a reality we are rapidly approaching, then freedom of speech becomes meaningless. I agree that monopolies and centralization are a threat to freedom. Though would argue that it should be addressed both via decentralization (and specifically through counter-anti-desintermediation as discussed in the P2P Foundation: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediation https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio...) and anti-trust enforcement.
tetrometal 6y ago
I agree completely. This is why I fully support Twitter's right to ban Trump, Amazon's right to dump Parler, etc. The left and the right both get freedom of association wrong. The right gets it wrong on Parler, the left gets it wrong on gay wedding cakes. Everyone needs to stop advocating for the use of the government gun against peaceful people, no matter how much of an asshole they consider their political adversaries to be.
nostromo 6y ago
Freedom of speech is a guiding principle that predates the United States, and the first amendment, by a few millennia. And yet every discussion about free speech online contains a few comments about the first amendment’s narrow legal scope. Sure, that’s right, but freedom of speech does not have a narrow legal scope; it’s a much broader concept, and it is global in nature. In almost every case online, the discussion is about the global ideal of freedom of speech, not about US law.
- jv22222 6y ago
  My clarification was just to try to bring clarity to the discussion because a lot of times (as seen in the thread) there is some confusion. I’m curious how what you just said translates into real world application? Not trying to argue I am genuinely interested to hear more!
  - nostromo 6y ago
    Sure thing, here's a real world application: Let's say an Amazon warehouse worker speaks with the local newspaper about unsafe work conditions. Amazon decides to fire him for this. Was this a violation of the first amendment? No. Was this a violation of the principle of freedom of speech? Maybe. Saying, "well this wasn't protected by the first amendment, so this is a non-issue" wouldn't be fair. Yes, it's not a first amendment issue, but it's still a freedom of speech issue.
    - jv22222 6y ago
      Thanks! This article helped me wrap my head around what you just said: https://journals.openedition.org/revdh/2680 https://journals.openedition.org/revdh/2680 > Hence free speech initially drove whistleblowing protection, and whilst it has been irrelevant for establishing whistleblowing protection, free speech is still driving whistleblower protection.
- alexeldeib 6y ago
  > In almost every case online, the discussion is about the global ideal of freedom of speech, not about US law. In the recent events in the US, a lot of people have (mistakenly, IMO) cited the first amendment for protection of speech many others don't like. But those protections afford no help against private actors. In that context GP makes a lot of sense bringing up this point. Example: a US senator cites the first amendment when discussing free speech after a publisher refuses to run his book: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/08/josh-hawley-publisher-cancels-book-in-wake-of-capitol-attack https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/08/josh-hawley-...
erichocean 6y ago
Try duck typing "the government" sometime. I think you'll find the paperwork doesn't match the power centers, and that the most powerful parts of "the government" are completely unaccountable to voters, and in fact, aren't even listed on the founding documents… It's a nice way to be in power if you can manage it.
tonymet 6y ago
I’d like to address this, since it’s a common retort meant to shutdown discussion on censorship. It’s disingenuous , because “First amendment” is so essential to American culture, that it means both the literal First Amendment to the constitution AND more importantly, the American principle of free expression. Ether you are aware that people are appealing to free expression as a principle, or you are unaware that free expression is more American than apple pie. That’s why I say this retort is disingenuous. So the legal scope of the literal first amendment doesn’t help the discussion on what people and companies should be doing. The discussion is about American values and if people, companies and the government should be living up to them. And that’s what people are trying to debate when they say “first amendment”.
- jv22222 6y ago
  > it’s a common retort meant to shutdown discussion on censorship For your reference, I did not say it to shut down the discussion. I purposefully said it to open up the discussion in order to hear viewpoints like this. It's something I'm very interested in seeing discussed and I would like to learn more about both sides of the argument in general.
- revnode 6y ago
  This. The companies are behaving in an un-American manner. What they are doing is deeply selfish and cynical. They should be criticized for their behavior and shamed for it. We should not excommunicate members of our society even if the things they say are reprehensible. And yes, the companies have a right to do it, but there are plenty of things you can do, but should nevertheless be shamed for doing.
  - steve76 6y ago
    Who would win in a deplatforming food fight? Google or Apple? Google's union now, right? And Apple fires people in elevators and vowed on their deathbed “I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this. So. Not saying you two should fight. If a fight did break out, who would win? And now that I think about it, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, all have their strengths and flaws. Amazon is hell for suppliers. Why should Apple get paid so much for something they can buy out of China? And does the AWS UI "just work"? Does it really? Facebook keeps files on people like some secret police intelligence unit. And Twitter's long term vision just won't work unless you have no mouth and must scream. Tweet for a subway door to open. How stupid do you have to be.
oh_sigh 6y ago
Does anyone need this clarification? I feel like this is like trying to stop a discussion on self driving cars and bringing up the trolley problem. Everyone knows it. No one (serious) is saying that private companies have a legal responsibility to host everyone's speech lest they be guilty of violating the first amendment.
chippy 6y ago
Are you replying to a comment? This appears to me, right now, as the top one in the thread and is unconnected to any others and seems to me to be orphaned. If it's in direct response to the submission, I cannot find anything in the submission that might give rise to a clarification
blast 6y ago
Free speech and censorship are issues that go far beyond just the First Amendment. This has always been the case, and recent efforts to narrow the scope of the term are actually part of the battle to reduce free speech (and increase censorship) that's going on right in the culture now.
webmaven 6y ago
> For clarification: > The 1st amendment ensures that the government may not stop you from saying what you want. > This is a separate issue from private companies removing/banning you. Each company has their own right and freedom to be as dickish as they want with regard to deleting your account etc - but that is not related to the 1st. It isn't quite as cut and dried as that. "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one." - H. L. Mencken An illuminating analogy may be thinking about what would happen to people's freedom of movement (which, BTW, isn't explicitly enumerated in the US Constitution, though it was in the Articles of Confederation) if most roads were privately owned and operated and/or most cars were rentals. To some extent, this legal territory was explored WRT transportation as the common law concept of a common carrier, and then applied to communications through Title II of the Telecommunications Act, and then applied to ISPs in 2015 but revoked in 2017. The question we then need to ask is to what extent do the strong network effects of social media justify similar constraints upon the rights of owners to exclude users as the natural monopolies of physical infrastructure constrain their owners. All that said, it is clear (to me anyway) is that the situation WRT Trump et al. being excluded from these platforms blows WAY past all such nuance and lands right in the middle of "falsely yelling fire in a theater" territory, frankly justifying outright bans on some speech not merely by the platform owners, but by the government as well (IOW censorship). This is not a conclusion that I am particularly comfortable with as I am sure it will be abused, but I have reached it nonetheless.

bluesign 6y ago

Yeah but if they have this freedom (being dickish etc) then they should also be responsible for what they are publishing on their platforms. They want to have their cake and eat it.

s17n 6y ago

"Freedom of press" can and should be interpreted to proscribe deplatforming by the big tech companies.

aidenn0 6y ago

It used to be true that companies could be dickish to you, but now thanks to the 13th amendment (and the courts interpretation thereof), there are specific ways that they cannot be dickish to you. Either way you are right that it's not related to the 1st amendment though.

ravenstine 6y ago

No, it isn't. There's already precedents for what businesses can and cannot prevent you from doing. If, for instance, you think a business should be compelled to bake a cake with a certain message on it, then you can't make the argument that there should be no regulation on how much a business can censor its users. That's not the only example. There's extensive case law that establishes how both governments and businesses have to either allow or curtail speech under certain conditions. A business can't legally compel you to do say something or wear a piece of clothing in a way that discriminates against you. A sex shop can't just open anywhere because, while it's been argued that they should be allowed as a form of free expression, they tend not to be considered as such under the spirit of the law. A person can be held responsible for the aftermath of shouting "fire" in a crowded room, even though this speech is superficially supported by the first amendment. Point being, we make decisions about freedom of speech that don't necessarily follow the letter of the constitution or stay within the bounds of the government. Freedom of speech isn't just a law. It's a social principle upon which America was founded. If all meaningful communication is dominated by too-big-to-fail businesses with AI that can scour all correspondence, a reality we are rapidly approaching, then freedom of speech becomes meaningless. The situation becomes worse when these companies are all politically aligned with the regime. This is why we can't ignore how private companies regulate communication through their systems.

chiefalchemist 6y ago
There's a difference between you saying what you want on the cake (if they had self-service), and the biz having to write what you want written. That said, agreed. Big Tech and Fed Govs working in concert is not a positive. Anyone cheering on FAANG's recent decisions is naive.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Big Tech and Fed Govs working in concert is not a positive. Anyone cheering on FAANG’s recent decisions is naive. FAANG’s recent decisions are directly against the head of the Federal Government, not taken in concert with “Fed Govs”.
  - chiefalchemist 6y ago
    For what, two more weeks? And that head is only 1/3 of the gov. FAANG is siding with the other two.
fabianhjr 6y ago
> a business should be compelled to bake a cake with a certain message on it That is a misrepresentation of the case: > Craig and Mullins filed a complaint to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission under the state's public accommodations law, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, which prohibits businesses open to the public from discriminating against their customers on the basis of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. The complain was under a _state law_ specifically to address sexual orientation discrimination and it has been acknowledged that such law doesn't force a business to make cakes with arbitrary messages. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado_Civil_Rights_Commission https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado... That said: > If all meaningful communication is dominated by too-big-to-fail businesses with AI that can scour all correspondence, a reality we are rapidly approaching, then freedom of speech becomes meaningless. I agree that monopolies and centralization are a threat to freedom. Though would argue that it should be addressed both via decentralization (and specifically through counter-anti-desintermediation as discussed in the P2P Foundation: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediation https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio...) and anti-trust enforcement.

tetrometal 6y ago

I agree completely. This is why I fully support Twitter's right to ban Trump, Amazon's right to dump Parler, etc. The left and the right both get freedom of association wrong. The right gets it wrong on Parler, the left gets it wrong on gay wedding cakes. Everyone needs to stop advocating for the use of the government gun against peaceful people, no matter how much of an asshole they consider their political adversaries to be.

nostromo 6y ago

Freedom of speech is a guiding principle that predates the United States, and the first amendment, by a few millennia. And yet every discussion about free speech online contains a few comments about the first amendment’s narrow legal scope. Sure, that’s right, but freedom of speech does not have a narrow legal scope; it’s a much broader concept, and it is global in nature. In almost every case online, the discussion is about the global ideal of freedom of speech, not about US law.

jv22222 6y ago
My clarification was just to try to bring clarity to the discussion because a lot of times (as seen in the thread) there is some confusion. I’m curious how what you just said translates into real world application? Not trying to argue I am genuinely interested to hear more!
- nostromo 6y ago
  Sure thing, here's a real world application: Let's say an Amazon warehouse worker speaks with the local newspaper about unsafe work conditions. Amazon decides to fire him for this. Was this a violation of the first amendment? No. Was this a violation of the principle of freedom of speech? Maybe. Saying, "well this wasn't protected by the first amendment, so this is a non-issue" wouldn't be fair. Yes, it's not a first amendment issue, but it's still a freedom of speech issue.
  - jv22222 6y ago
    Thanks! This article helped me wrap my head around what you just said: https://journals.openedition.org/revdh/2680 https://journals.openedition.org/revdh/2680 > Hence free speech initially drove whistleblowing protection, and whilst it has been irrelevant for establishing whistleblowing protection, free speech is still driving whistleblower protection.
alexeldeib 6y ago
> In almost every case online, the discussion is about the global ideal of freedom of speech, not about US law. In the recent events in the US, a lot of people have (mistakenly, IMO) cited the first amendment for protection of speech many others don't like. But those protections afford no help against private actors. In that context GP makes a lot of sense bringing up this point. Example: a US senator cites the first amendment when discussing free speech after a publisher refuses to run his book: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/08/josh-hawley-publisher-cancels-book-in-wake-of-capitol-attack https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/08/josh-hawley-...

erichocean 6y ago

Try duck typing "the government" sometime. I think you'll find the paperwork doesn't match the power centers, and that the most powerful parts of "the government" are completely unaccountable to voters, and in fact, aren't even listed on the founding documents… It's a nice way to be in power if you can manage it.

tonymet 6y ago

I’d like to address this, since it’s a common retort meant to shutdown discussion on censorship. It’s disingenuous , because “First amendment” is so essential to American culture, that it means both the literal First Amendment to the constitution AND more importantly, the American principle of free expression. Ether you are aware that people are appealing to free expression as a principle, or you are unaware that free expression is more American than apple pie. That’s why I say this retort is disingenuous. So the legal scope of the literal first amendment doesn’t help the discussion on what people and companies should be doing. The discussion is about American values and if people, companies and the government should be living up to them. And that’s what people are trying to debate when they say “first amendment”.

jv22222 6y ago
> it’s a common retort meant to shutdown discussion on censorship For your reference, I did not say it to shut down the discussion. I purposefully said it to open up the discussion in order to hear viewpoints like this. It's something I'm very interested in seeing discussed and I would like to learn more about both sides of the argument in general.
revnode 6y ago
This. The companies are behaving in an un-American manner. What they are doing is deeply selfish and cynical. They should be criticized for their behavior and shamed for it. We should not excommunicate members of our society even if the things they say are reprehensible. And yes, the companies have a right to do it, but there are plenty of things you can do, but should nevertheless be shamed for doing.
- steve76 6y ago
  Who would win in a deplatforming food fight? Google or Apple? Google's union now, right? And Apple fires people in elevators and vowed on their deathbed “I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this. So. Not saying you two should fight. If a fight did break out, who would win? And now that I think about it, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, all have their strengths and flaws. Amazon is hell for suppliers. Why should Apple get paid so much for something they can buy out of China? And does the AWS UI "just work"? Does it really? Facebook keeps files on people like some secret police intelligence unit. And Twitter's long term vision just won't work unless you have no mouth and must scream. Tweet for a subway door to open. How stupid do you have to be.

oh_sigh 6y ago

Does anyone need this clarification? I feel like this is like trying to stop a discussion on self driving cars and bringing up the trolley problem. Everyone knows it. No one (serious) is saying that private companies have a legal responsibility to host everyone's speech lest they be guilty of violating the first amendment.

chippy 6y ago

Are you replying to a comment? This appears to me, right now, as the top one in the thread and is unconnected to any others and seems to me to be orphaned. If it's in direct response to the submission, I cannot find anything in the submission that might give rise to a clarification

blast 6y ago

Free speech and censorship are issues that go far beyond just the First Amendment. This has always been the case, and recent efforts to narrow the scope of the term are actually part of the battle to reduce free speech (and increase censorship) that's going on right in the culture now.

webmaven 6y ago

> For clarification: > The 1st amendment ensures that the government may not stop you from saying what you want. > This is a separate issue from private companies removing/banning you. Each company has their own right and freedom to be as dickish as they want with regard to deleting your account etc - but that is not related to the 1st. It isn't quite as cut and dried as that. "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one." - H. L. Mencken An illuminating analogy may be thinking about what would happen to people's freedom of movement (which, BTW, isn't explicitly enumerated in the US Constitution, though it was in the Articles of Confederation) if most roads were privately owned and operated and/or most cars were rentals. To some extent, this legal territory was explored WRT transportation as the common law concept of a common carrier, and then applied to communications through Title II of the Telecommunications Act, and then applied to ISPs in 2015 but revoked in 2017. The question we then need to ask is to what extent do the strong network effects of social media justify similar constraints upon the rights of owners to exclude users as the natural monopolies of physical infrastructure constrain their owners. All that said, it is clear (to me anyway) is that the situation WRT Trump et al. being excluded from these platforms blows WAY past all such nuance and lands right in the middle of "falsely yelling fire in a theater" territory, frankly justifying outright bans on some speech not merely by the platform owners, but by the government as well (IOW censorship). This is not a conclusion that I am particularly comfortable with as I am sure it will be abused, but I have reached it nonetheless.