About the 1st amendment, it's a right to speak in public, but a private companies owns these platforms. There is a difference. What they are doing to get ppl though, to join to make them popular and make money, and let them speak for along time, then when they are powerful enough they decide to cut you off when they let you talk for so long, that's a bitch ...
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I don't believe the FAANGs are private companies. They are operating on a DARPA created platform, the internet, and all are funded by government funds both overtly and covertly.
Furthermore, it doesn't even matter if they are private companies or not. They are public fora. They were intended to be public fora from the outset, and therefore they are bound to respect free speech for the public.
Were they private clubs where members were exclusive, that would be a different matter. They are spending government funds on fora proclaimed to be completely open to the public at large to censor certain speech and individuals contrary to their statements.
This is partly why they continually claim they made mistakes censoring people over whom a large enough stink is made, or that the censoring is due to some violation of their policies.
The recent Twatter suspension of Candace Owens, who simply changed the word 'white' for 'jewish' IIRC in tweets made by Jeong shows exactly what their purpose is, and how it is being conducted to order, rather than mistakenly, or due to internal policy.
There is a coordinated international effort to control speech, and it's working because the parts working together each claim to be private and separate. It's not true, and we need to stop allowing our taxes to be spent to censor us.
Totally agree with what you said; especially with:
Absolutely. Even if not legally, at least morally and ethically. (But we know they haven't much of either).
You make me think of the 2nd ROOT of the PROBLEM which I did not state in this post. Namely,
the absence of the RULE OF LAW
There are anti-trust laws in place - Sherman Antitrust Act (26 Stat. , 15 U.S.C.).
But the issue/problem is that it is not enforced like it use to be.
The lack of enforcement of this particular law, and many other laws in the USA, is systemic.
Whether you are looking at the blatantly illegal rigging of the markets by the Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgans, et al., or war crimes, politicians and elites not being properly prosecuted, and so on, it is pervasive that this absence has destroyed the legal fabric that once held the nation together and upright.
Until there is restoration of the rule of law, nothing will change but will only get worse.
And when you have useless and spineless cowards like the Attorney General Jeff Sessions in place, it only proves that those institutions are greatly compromised as well.
I still don't get why people are not looking at these two underlying root causes of this fiasco.
Sad. Very sad state of affairs indeed.
Does that mean the whole internet is public space, and all sites therein are operating in a public space and don't have private property rights to choose to do things as they want?
Companies receive funding at time in the real world, and people can protest on public land, but not on their property. Anyone can make a site in the public internet to speak as they want. But other people's property of their sites get to determine if they want to allow you to enter or not.
Does that mean everyone who receives federal funding becomes publicly beholden?
It doesn't hold up to me...
I think this is a bit besides the point. See my reply to @valued-customer regarding the absence of the rule of law and how these social behemoths should be broken up under anti-trust laws, as they are obviously abusing their power to censor public fora for political gain/alignment.
A public forum paid for with government funds must be obligated to observe the obvious right of the sovereign people speaking there. All the FAANGs, as well as the enemedia like CNN, spend taxes forcibly taken from the people, and have no right to spend those funds to censor us contrary to the clear specification of government power in the Constitution.
Government has no rights, and no power is delegated to it lawfully to censor we rulers of ourselves. Spending funds received from government to create censored public fora is unconstitutional for very good reason.
It's not that receiving food stamps makes you publicly beholden. It's that using government funds to create a public forum does make you beholden to the rules restricting government from censoring the speech of the public. Even if those funds are attempted to be - indeed, even more importantly - covertly distributed to the fora.
Hi @krnel, I had replied you to this thread 2 days ago but for some reason it didn't get through (don't think it was censored but rather just a bug from Steemit), as that day the system was working really choppy); so, I actually forgot the reply I had written.
But when you say "private companies" own the platform (and I assume you mean they have the right to control the contents), I think this is not a valid argument. In the following video Stephan Molyneux acutely points out that these platforms don't censor contensts from what is legally defined as terrorists groups such as Antifa and other radical Muslim groups; why not? It is clear that it is a coordinated effort to go with the narratives they want. Here's the video and well worth the watch, as Molyneux is very articulate and explains what I want to convey much better than I ever can: