In the bakery case, you can go to another bakery, there are many of them in driving distance and many will gladly bake a flaming gay wedding cake.
For communicating on the internet, there are only a few companies that own ALL of the social media services. These service are the primary way that humans communicate now. Censoring people based on their political views locks people out from contacting groups of people on either side of the fence.
This is exactly like if 20 years ago, Ma Bell cut off your phone service because you are a republican! One can argue back then that there were plenty of pay phones around.
The Ma Bell argument is a good argument.
Here is another angle, these social media companies take in a lot of AD revenue and they actually work with democrat campaigns OPENLY. They should be regarded as political action committees.
If they want to do this stuff, fine, but if you are providing skewed search results and manipulating what people can or cannot see in favor of one party or campaign, then you are providing the same exact thing that a PAC provides in support of a candidate. In fact, these companies are providing millions of dollars of free services to these campaigns through these actions.
Exactly. Or if a newspaper or TV or radio station refuses to run any ads for GOP candidates, is it just fine & dandy for them to say, “Hey, if you don’t like it, start your own newspaper or TV station!” ?
“For communicating on the internet, there are only a few companies that own ALL of the social media services.”
To cut this short. There are plenty of places online to say stuff.
And please do reply with how those other sites aren’t fun or all your buddies aren’t there, or X,Y, or Z number of people aren’t using them.
The point is that they exist, just like there are other bakeries.
It will be an interesting case. Is censorship and denial of service denying Americans their right to peaceably assemble and freely associate? After all, online media giants are how a vast number of citizens assemble and associate these days. Sure, you could find other ways. In the Ma Bell days, you could have bought a CB radio, or strung your own telephone wires, right? I believe a large number of leftists would be just fine with cutting off communications and the ability to freely associate to much of the country (flyover country, red states), and they are actually able accomplish this to a large degree via FB, Twitter, Google, etc.
” These service are the primary way that humans communicate now.”
Nonsense.
Besides, even on the internet there are thousands of ways to communicate. We are communicating on an internet platform now. Some would call it social media.
The idea of Facebook being “THE public square” is equal nonsense.
Facebook is not even a monopoly subject to anti-trust law.
However, Amazon and Google are both Trusts in violation of anti-trust law.
And they will be broken up.
There’s hundreds of social media sites. A few companies own the BIG ones that you know about. But there’s tons of social media services that haven’t hit critical mass yet. Ban enough people the competition will grow. it’s nothing like Ma Bell.