This is a tough one. These are private companies that in theory should be able to delete or ban him at will. No different than FR. If they want to be liberal, conservatives need an alternative.
Should your auto insurance company be able to ban you from getting insurance simply because they do not like your politics? Should your electric company decide that as a conservative you no longer will get their services?
Along the same lines, should any private company deny your basic constitutional right to freedom of speech?
This is why Twitter and Facebook must be regulated.
I believe these companies receive federal funding so he may remove their monies.
“This is a tough one. These are private companies that in theory should be able to delete or ban him at will. No different than FR. If they want to be liberal, conservatives need an alternative.”
Someone quoted Mike Huckabee earlier as comparing these social media companies to the phone company. What if the phone company was using a filter so if you said something unacceptable over the phone lines they cut off your call and cancelled your account? Wouldn’t that be comparable to what Facebook / Twitter / YouTube are doing now? That wouldn’t be tolerated... why should this?
Very easy one. Enemy combatants. No rights. Crush them.
Agree, but then their actions should be counted as payment in kind for democratic campaigns. They are no different than a PAC and should be treated as such.
Very different from FR. They have billions of users and represent a huge fraction of the American populace. They have enormous sway with the public and to allow them to censor content they don't like is a deadly threat to the survival of our system of governance.
These people are like phone companies and they should be required to carry all traffic, just like phone companies are required to carry.
FR doesn’t require a liability shield as the site is not used as a method of planning or carrying out liability-generating activity.
FB/Twitter are used as such, every single day, countless times.
If they are utilities and they are media they have to follow the media laws they’ve been avoiding this forever
Hardly. Twitter and Facebook aren't private in the least bit. They are both PUBLICLY-TRADED companies on the stock exchange.
ALSO, BOTH of these companies have CLEARLY risen to the level of being PUBLIC UTILITIES used for mass communication and in many cases the SOLE media by which certain information is broadcast and shared (Fire/Police Depts, etc)..
AT&T, Sprint, & Verizon, are not permitted to censor your phone discussions and neither should Twitter and Facebook!
When they decide to become Editors, they become in essence newspapers.
I myself wonder if Trump is actually going to hit the TV Station entities to report news rather than leftist programming under the guise of News programming. CNN is essentially a DNC Talk Show as is MSNBC.
“This is a tough one. These are private companies that in theory should be able to delete or ban him at will. No different than FR. If they want to be liberal, conservatives need an alternative.”
You’re right: IF they want to advocate for a position. However, the social media companies have said they’re just utilities providing a platform, posters are responsible for content.
Once they pick a side, then THEY are responsible for their content—and liable for lawsuits, just like newspapers.
It’s a no-win situation for them. Do they advocate for liberal positions AND take responsibility for their content? Or do they cut back their advocacy?
Yesterday I was posting a comment at an aol site regarding President Trump. I made a comment about Trump and HCQ and the fact that Fauci never mentions the importance of taking zinc with HCQ as per recommendation from Dr. Zelenko. I also mentioned his support of Gilead Science’s drug Remdesivir which is not showing major success. Then I wrote a final sentence about how this appears to be a war over whether a successful low cost early treatment will succeed versus the push by Big Pharma for costly drugs and vaccines. And that this will end as a fight between drug and vaccine companies versus other large business interests that want the economy to open up. I immediately got a notice that I had a better chance of being posted if I refrained from controversial (I think that was the word)language in my post. So I removed the last sentence that included the word Big Pharma and my comment was posted.
Then a few posts down where someone else commented about someone’s censorship complaint I started to write about how I had just been warned because I had written a sentence in which I had referred to pharmaceutical enterprises by a commonly used term beginning with a B and a P, and again I was given a notice about watching my language if I wanted to be posted. The whole thread had included some really nasty comments about and descriptions of unfavored political individuals. The person who triggered my second attempt to post was complaining that they were tired of censorship and might quite AOL sites altogether. This followed a complaint by someone who said their comment had just been removed.