2 ms·
The concept of a public square or public forum is what we're trying to articulate here, most of us are aware it's not provided for in constitutional language. I
by cheeseomlit 3y ago
The concept of a public square or public forum is what we're trying to articulate here, most of us are aware it's not provided for in constitutional language. It's only somewhat recently that it's become relevant, the amount of speech that happens on privately controlled platforms is not something that was predicted or prepared for, it's a massive paradigm shift in human relations. While the proposed laws may be unconstitutional, the grievances that motivated them are legitimate and should be addressed. I just don't think it's helpful to shut down every conversation on the topic on the grounds of constitutionality, particularly in a case like this where the 'spirit' of the constitution is IMO clearly being violated even if the literal words of it are not.
- TulliusCicero 3y agoI don't think the spirit of the Constitution is being violated here at all. As you say, the Constitution didn't account for private speech making it so easy to reach a wide audience, so it doesn't really have anything to say here, one way or the other. Personally, I think having a government Twitter as a "digital public square of last resort" is fine as a solution, as long as it has no curation abilities whatsoever: no recommended pages, no default feed or algorithmic timeline, not even a search function. Any pages you get to come via external links, or internal links placed manually by whichever page you're looking at. This way, you avoid any issue of bias, and while there may be Nazi pages somewhere there, you wouldn't be able to get to them except by getting linked elsewhere to Nazis, it wouldn't be the platform actually recommending Nazis to you (because it wouldn't recommend anything).