I’m not sure how this can be a free speech issue being that these are private companies. Just like a bakery should not have to bake a cake for a gay couple. I myself refuse to have anything to do with Facebook.
The next suit...let's see what happens when foreigners post "ideas" about our government on Facebook.
I don’t have a problem with them censoring users.
I have a problem with them not enforcing their terms of service for a long period of time and then dropping the hammer just before a critical election.
That’s election tampering.
If they had been censoring conservatives all along there would be plenty of conservative sites filling the void.
What a slippery slope. FreeRepublic is done if they rule that they can’t censor users for political opinions. A solution: IF the site is billed as open and non-partisan THEN no censorship. State your political preference affiliation and you can censor all you want.
Here is the difference:
Public access channels, while private entities, are a creature of long-standing agreements between communities and cable companies. They would in all probability not exist but for those agreements. IOW, they would not exist except for government regulating them into existence. They’re quasi-government, like the US Postal Service.
Facebook, Google, Twitter, and yes, Free Republic are creations of the market — of private entities who saw a need and filled it. They are much more private entities than a public access TV station is, and therefore not subject to the same regulations.
From Facebook's IPO Prospectus dated May 3, 2012 (emphasis mine):
Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.People use Facebook to stay connected with their friends and family, to discover what is going on in the world around them, and to share and express what matters to them to the people they care about.
Developers can use the Facebook Platform to build applications (apps) and websites that integrate with Facebook to reach our global network of users and to build products that are more personalized, social, and engaging.
Advertisers can engage with more than 900 million monthly active users (MAUs) on Facebook or subsets of our users based on information they have chosen to share with us such as their age, location, gender, or interests. We offer advertisers a unique combination of reach, relevance, social context, and engagement to enhance the value of their ads.
We believe that we are at the forefront of enabling faster, easier, and richer communication between people and that Facebook has become an integral part of many of our users’ daily lives. We have experienced rapid growth in the number of users and their engagement.
[snip -- the following emphasis is Facebook's from the prospectus]
How We Create Value for Users
Our top priority is to build useful and engaging products that enable you to:
- Connect with Your Friends. With more than 900 million MAUs worldwide, our users are increasingly able to find and stay connected with their friends, family, and colleagues on Facebook.
- Discover and Learn. We believe that users come to Facebook to discover and learn more about what is going on in the world around them, particularly in the lives of their friends and family and with public figures and organizations that interest them.
- Express Yourself. We enable our users to share and publish their opinions, ideas, photos, and activities to audiences ranging from their closest friends to our 900 million users, giving every user a voice within the Facebook community.
- Control What You Share. Through Facebook’s privacy and sharing settings, our users can control what they share and with whom they share it.
- Experience Facebook Across the Web. Through apps and websites built by developers using the Facebook Platform, our users can interact with their Facebook friends while playing games, listening to music, watching movies, reading news, and engaging in other activities.
- Stay Connected with Your Friends on Mobile Devices. Through the combination of our mobile sites, smartphone apps, and feature phone products, users can bring Facebook with them on mobile devices wherever they go.
Foundations of the Social Web
We believe that the web, including the mobile web, is evolving to become more social and personalized. This evolution is creating more rewarding experiences that are centered on people, their connections, and their interests. We believe that the following elements form the foundation of the social web:
- Authentic Identity. We believe that using your real name, connecting to your real friends, and sharing your genuine interests online create more engaging and meaningful experiences. Representing yourself with your authentic identity online encourages you to behave with the same norms that foster trust and respect in your daily life offline. Authentic identity is core to the Facebook experience, and we believe that it is central to the future of the web. Our terms of service require you to use your real name and we encourage you to be your true self online, enabling us and Platform developers to provide you with more personalized experiences.
- Social Graph. The Social Graph represents the connections between people and their friends and interests. Every person or entity is represented by a point within the graph, and the affiliations between people and their friends and interests form billions of connections between the points. Our mapping of the Social Graph enables Facebook and Platform developers to build more engaging user experiences that are based on these connections.
- Social Distribution. Over time, people are consuming and creating more kinds of information at a faster pace across a broader range of devices. The growing volume of information makes it challenging to find meaningful and trusted content and to effectively make your voice heard. Facebook organizes and prioritizes content and serves as a powerful social distribution tool delivering to users what we believe they will find most compelling based on their friends and interests.
That is what Zuckerberg sold to investors when he went public with Facebook. Is that what is happening now? Doesn't the prospectus describe a public forum where all viewpoints are equally tolerated?
The prospectus said:
Express Yourself. We enable our users to share and publish their opinions, ideas, photos, and activities to audiences ranging from their closest friends to our 900 million users, giving every user a voice within the Facebook community.
Is Facebook making good on its promise to "enable our users to share and publish their opinions" and "give every user a voice within the Facebook community?"
Set aside, for the moment, the banning of conservatives from the platform. What about the advertisers who are losing access to that audience?
The prospectus said:
Advertisers can engage with more than 900 million monthly active users (MAUs) on Facebook or subsets of our users based on information they have chosen to share with us such as their age, location, gender, or interests. We offer advertisers a unique combination of reach, relevance, social context, and engagement to enhance the value of their ads.
Facebook is now denying access to large segments of banned users that advertisers expected to be there when they invested in building their storefronts on Facebook.
Finally, the prospectus said:
We believe that we are at the forefront of enabling faster, easier, and richer communication between people and that Facebook has become an integral part of many of our users’ daily lives.
By their own admission, their users have made Facebook "an integral part... of users' daily lives." Now Facebook wants to rip that away from people after people invested so much time and energy into it?
These should be the main arguments against Facebook.
-PJ
I have no problem with them having a Terms of Service that dictates what will get you banned from their site and enforcing that TOS. I DO have a problem with liberals threatening to kill people, harassing people, and inciting violence, against most social media networks’ TOS and nothing being done, but a conservative hurts the feelings of a liberal and gets a permanent ban.
Private company, leave it alone. Choose to use or not, vote with feet (mouse?). Do we really want the net to be a “public resource” (read nationalized)?
KYPD
The tech companies will win on the question put in that way.
I keep telling our side that they are looking for a constitutional right that might as well be be located with the “right to get married” and the right to an abortion.
“It will be interesting to see Kavanaugh’s and Gorsuch’s take on this. “
They are both big proponents of narrow decisions.
It is not the government’s role to control private companies and their philosophical stands.
If conservatives want a free speech venue, create a competitor to facebook, you tube, Google, Twitter.
Freedom of speech is guaranteed against govt intrusion. It has nothing to do with private organizations. They are not bound by the first amendment at all.
Probably not. Public access TV is vastly different from private websites. The court would have to make a pretty poorly worded decision for this ruling to have anything to do with FB and Twitter.
They’re looking for excuses to ban content and non-PC people from social media.
Big Tech Censorship of the Right Becoming a Regular Thing
https://stream.org/big-tech-censorship/
It is either a Free Speech issue or an Anti Trust issue with regards to consequences, I lean heavily to Anti Trust because they have Violated it in Spades.
WOW! This will be a hugely important case. Hopefully, this is where the appointments of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh make the difference for freedom of speech and against censorship.