> 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 compa

> 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.