The idea that a private social/sharing/communications platform should be required to carry the messages of the head of government is strongly authoritarian and quite unconstitutional.
It’s incredible to me that people will argue the government’s lack of control over mass media platforms is censorship.
IMO, nobody should be required to carry government propaganda.
yeah but you can still disagree with them for doing so. I don't get why so many people think the 1A protects them from criticism of the way they exercise their own freedom of speech. It's not just your freedom of speech that gets protected.
You can define "censorship" any way you want, but if you use it for cases where liberty is increased then you're pretty much making it useless for discussion. We normally use it as the flipside of freedom of speech. It just doesn't make sense to define it in such a way that increased censorship can also mean increased freedom of speech.
You want to think in terms of liberty.
There's always a line to be drawn... when are you preventing a message from being heard vs. when are you forcing someone to propagate a message they don't want to express? The line is the balance of liberty -- whose freedoms are being impinged the most?
In the case of Trump and Facebook, we can put it more directly. The harm to Trump and the people who want to hear/promote his messages vs. the harm to Facebook and the people who receive his messages. Facebook is very far from the only place most people can hear from Trump, so there's little harm to Trump and supporters of his if Facebook declines to carry his messages. That means it's mostly up to Facebook to decide whether being a conduit for his kind of messages is good for it or not. He certainly seemed to violate all kinds of their terms and conditions, so for one thing it would be hard to moderate Facebook at all if they allowed him to stay. Not to mention, it's really not good for democratic society in general to propagate false election conspiracies. (I doubt Facebook or any corporation cares about something like that, but they may still consider it if enough of their users care.)
Regarding the first amendment... censorship and freedom of speech is certainly a broader topic than the first amendment. It's relevant here though, because we're talking about whether Facebook should somehow be required in some way to propagate messages from the government, even if it doesn't want to.
Dude are you an LLM? It's an article about zuck saying the government pressured Facebook into censoring posts and how he wishes he had pushed back against them instead of complying.
I completely agree, but that same entity cannot state they support free speech ever again. If they own their censorship, that's completely fine, but this backtracking with "cool Zuck" schtick is ridiculous. The stain to their reputation on free speech is permanent.
> The idea that a private social/sharing/communications platform should be required to carry the messages of the head of government is strongly authoritarian and quite unconstitutional.
Except it's neither authoritarian nor unconstitutional. Private companies are already _required_ to carry government messaging. Several examples: emergency broadcast system, AMBER alerts or presidential alerts (which cannot be silenced) to your phone.
AFAIK there is not a similar legal basis for requiring a social media company to participate in the rebroadcasting of a specific individual's speech just because of their current elected position.
It’s incredible to me that people will argue the government’s lack of control over mass media platforms is censorship.
IMO, nobody should be required to carry government propaganda.