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> The 1st Amendment does not cover the private actions of companies This is exactly the statement the comment you replied to is criticizing. It keeps getting r
by hn92726819 4y ago
> The 1st Amendment does not cover the private actions of companies
This is exactly the statement the comment you replied to is criticizing. It keeps getting repeated in the wrong places, like here in this comment thread.
There's free speech, U.S. Constitution amendment 1, and there's free speech as an idea. I'd wager when people complain about lack of free speech, they are more concerned about the idea rather than the amendment. I think most people here know that amendment 1 relates only to the government, so it's unhelpful and unrelated to even bring up the first amendment.
Edit: of course, you're right that anyone complaining about lack of amendment 1 in this situation doesn't make sense, but note that's not the same as people complaining about a lack of free speech.
- Joker_vD 4y agoThe 1st amendment was written at a very specific time back when the governments were the biggest oppressors, and the megacorporations of modern kind didn't exist; so it has protections against historically well-known and well-understood state censorship but not against not yet existing corporate censorship.
- tbrownaw 4y agoIt's part of what's more-or-less the design document for the federal government. So of course it doesn't talk about behavior of non-government entities. Not because that's not important, but because it's off-topic and out of scope.
- nullc 4y agoThe government is the ultimate monopoly, you have no alternatives to it. Some things have changed but that hasn't. Instead of the first amendment being somehow applied to private actors (really dicey because doing that would violate _their_ first amendment rights!) perhaps what you should want instead is the re-fanging of antitrust?