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Free speech as a principle is much broader than what’s protected by the first amendment.
by NotYourLawyer 3y ago
Free speech as a principle is much broader than what’s protected by the first amendment.
- mindslight 3y agoExactly. This article is from that vein of attorneys explaining things in terms of the law as written. It's true in the sense of legal technicalities, but misses the forest for the trees. And being thoroughly steeped in descriptivism, they generally end up straying from their lane and making incorrect statements like "They can be booted off Twitter and any charges of 'Censorship!' don't apply." (it most certainly is censorship - it's just not illegal censorship). Ultimately the US's Bill of Rights is flawed, having been created before the discoveries of formal logic and complexity induced contradictions of the early 1900's. Framing rights in negative terms allows entities that aren't the de jure government yet still have de facto coercive power to exercise their "rights" at scale, unconstrained by any sense of equity versus individuals' rights. It's why "The Twitter Files" is such a Rorschach red herring - you either see government employees doing the exact same thing that corporate power brokers routinely do over golf games etc, or you get triggered by "government" while ignoring the rest. Either way ignores questioning the sheer majority of censorship. And as corporations become more powerful and unavoidable, they encroach on ever more of our human rights, with no fundamental legal basis to reign them in.