Posted on 10/17/2018 9:52:58 AM PDT by TigerClaws
He says it wouldn’t have bothered his show anyway.
Besides, we don’t want to force them to do anything except enforce their terms uniformly.
Sucking people in so they can create a monopoly and then enforcing their terms as an election approaches is a criminal conspiracy to interfere in an election.
While I agree with the sentiment, recent rulings by the court could, in fact, force publishers to print odious tracts, just like a baker can be forced to bake a cake.
The DC Circuit case had absolutely nothing to do with treating social media providers as government actors for the purposes of the 1st Amendment. That was a case involving the FCC’s Obama era net-neutrality rules (which have since been overturned).
Don’t read the NY Slimes headline about the case, read the case itself:
This was a case about the FCC’s regulatory authority over broadband providers and high-speed internet access and a Constitutional challenge to that regulatory scheme. Again, and this is important, those regulations no longer exist. They were effectively overturned by the FCC in June of this year.
The second case was from 1958, and had nothing to do with the internet at all, as the internet didn’t even exist.
So again, do you have a citation that supports your contention that the federal courts (any federal court) has regulated a social media provider as a governmental actor under the First Amendment?
Trump can't block Twitter followers, federal judge says
The social media platform, Buchwald said, is a "designated public forum" from which Trump cannot exclude individual plaintiffs.
Not per the TOS.
Free Republic is a closed discussion group... you know that when you sign up... it’s not a free speech platform... it’s a conservative speech platform.
Public Access TV... Facebook... and a host of other platforms that promote themselves as for ALL people should play by the rules that they have set forth in a fair manner.
If it’s not explicitly violent, or explicitly illegal... it should be allowed on these open platforms. If not they are violating their TOS and they should be held liable if the content producers are damaged.
Exactly... The FTC should have jurisdiction... you can’t build a massive monopoly under one set of rules and then screw 60M Americans out of their place on that platform.
Then they should not be allowed to monopolize the technology with prohibitive/non-existent tech licensing fees or overly litigious behavior.
Websites have throughput issues as well in terms of bandwidth, server space, etc.
And all that space they need for datamining.
Youtube isn’t blocking content because of ‘thresholds’. Michele Malkin and Dennis Prager are being lumped with porn content (adults only) strictly as an ideological blacklist.
I think there is enough there to deny them the privilege of shadow banning, account closing, flat out censoring, without destroying parts of the constitution and affecting simple post/respond sites like this one.
It may come down to balancing political time. With equal time or equal sponsored accounts. But I think it should start with revoking all intellectual property patents, copyrights from social media.
Even the name Social Media categorizes these industries as new and in need of regulation.
The biggest problem, the age of scotus ... how much interest and aptitude will they have to learn the technology to correctly rule on this case?
“People who would like to stick it to Zuckerberg etc should realize that this can also be used against sites like this. Beware.”
= = = = = = = = = = = =
Your way ISN’T working.
The question is whether a very large Social Media forum becomes a defacto Town Square”. If so, then they become a defacto public square and attempts to censor ideas on that forum would then run afoul of the Constitution. Facebook, Google and Twitter have become the Nation’s Town Square. I expect the hammer is going to come down on them.
In this case you might end up with a 9-0 decision.
They have reaped the rewards of a free and open internet. Their attempts to close it down for everyone else is probably going to fail.
We are not ‘social media’. We are a forum with a very limited focus.
Facebook and Free Republic are private companies and can censor at will
Aren’t they publicly traded companies?
The judge didn’t say anything about Twitter being a utility. (It hasn’t been ruled such.)
The issue in that case was whether a public official (note the governmental action) created a public forum, which in turn would implicate the First Amendment.
“The primary point of dispute between the parties is whether a public official’s blocking of the individual plaintiffs on Twitter implicates a forum for First
Amendment purposes.”
The word “utility” isn’t even in the opinion, and the analysis has nothing to do with Twitter. It has to do with the public forum test, and whether one is created on the platform, by an elected official.
The case is only incidentally about Twitter, and Twitter is not implicated in the decision. The decision is solely between the plaintiffs and the President.
Note that the first step in the analysis is government control:
“First, to potentially qualify as a forum, the space in
question must be owned or controlled by the government.”
Now, the Judge is WAY, WAY off base in the analysis here, and got the result completely wrong, but it’s irrelevant, because this case doesn’t say what you think it does.
You may very well be correct, but it will be interesting to see what precedent is cited in the case at hand.
As Publicly traded companies, they are directed by their boards.
They can do wat their boards allow.
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