Arkady
President
The following article, dealing with Facebook's policies about hate speech, takes for granted the fact that, as a private company, Facebook can censor content as it sees fit, and then the article moves on to discussing whether it should censor content.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_facto...uld_not_be_in_the_business_of_censorship.html
I'd like to look at the more fundamental question of whether Facebook should even be allowed to censor speech, or whether First Amendment rights should apply there, and in other similar public forums.
The concept isn't unprecedented. Back before the Supreme Court was packed with lunatic right-wingers by a series of terrible presidents, it decided a case (Amalgamated Foods Employees Union Local 590 v. Logan Valley Plaza), which held that since the shopping mall, by 1968, had become the modern equivalent of main street, the landowners shouldn't be able to limit the use of that property by members of the public in a manner that would not be permissible if the property were owned by a municipality. In other words, if it would be illegal for a municipality to block union organizing on main street, because of the first amendment, it should be illegal for a shopping mall to block that activity on its equivalent of main street.
It was a solid bit of reasoning, in light of the growing importance of private forums in public life. The theoretical right to free speech on main street or the village green may have been of central importance in 1789, but in an age when there's often no equivalent of main street or the village green -- with strip malls owning all available useful public forums from horizon to horizon, and more and more communications taking place through corporate-owned networks or within privatized spaces, that theoretical right is of diminishing practical use. To maintain the same effective power for free speech today and especially in the future, that right needs to be extended to at least some forums controlled by private individuals.
Unfortunately, as the Supreme Court deteriorated, in the years after 1968, it moved away from those decisions and essentially re-established the role of giant corporations as public censors. And so, these days, even the most public of forums, like Facebook, can censor anything on its servers as arbitrarily as its owners want. But should it be that way? I don't think so. I think that if you project forward current trends of privatization and dominance of corporate modes of communication, you get to the point where just a few huge corporations will have the de facto ability to control almost anything you can say and do. We need to be willing to extend the principles of our Constitutional rights to the new "main streets" and "village greens" or those rights won't mean a heck of a lot.
Many states have continued down that road, notwithstanding the regression of the US Supreme Court into a haven for corporate stooges. In Massachusetts, for example, courts have ruled that the state Constitution provides for various public rights within private malls (e.g., malls can't block people from getting signatures for petitions on their grounds). But with big, multi-state forums like Facebook, that state-level enlightenment isn't much use.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_facto...uld_not_be_in_the_business_of_censorship.html
I'd like to look at the more fundamental question of whether Facebook should even be allowed to censor speech, or whether First Amendment rights should apply there, and in other similar public forums.
The concept isn't unprecedented. Back before the Supreme Court was packed with lunatic right-wingers by a series of terrible presidents, it decided a case (Amalgamated Foods Employees Union Local 590 v. Logan Valley Plaza), which held that since the shopping mall, by 1968, had become the modern equivalent of main street, the landowners shouldn't be able to limit the use of that property by members of the public in a manner that would not be permissible if the property were owned by a municipality. In other words, if it would be illegal for a municipality to block union organizing on main street, because of the first amendment, it should be illegal for a shopping mall to block that activity on its equivalent of main street.
It was a solid bit of reasoning, in light of the growing importance of private forums in public life. The theoretical right to free speech on main street or the village green may have been of central importance in 1789, but in an age when there's often no equivalent of main street or the village green -- with strip malls owning all available useful public forums from horizon to horizon, and more and more communications taking place through corporate-owned networks or within privatized spaces, that theoretical right is of diminishing practical use. To maintain the same effective power for free speech today and especially in the future, that right needs to be extended to at least some forums controlled by private individuals.
Unfortunately, as the Supreme Court deteriorated, in the years after 1968, it moved away from those decisions and essentially re-established the role of giant corporations as public censors. And so, these days, even the most public of forums, like Facebook, can censor anything on its servers as arbitrarily as its owners want. But should it be that way? I don't think so. I think that if you project forward current trends of privatization and dominance of corporate modes of communication, you get to the point where just a few huge corporations will have the de facto ability to control almost anything you can say and do. We need to be willing to extend the principles of our Constitutional rights to the new "main streets" and "village greens" or those rights won't mean a heck of a lot.
Many states have continued down that road, notwithstanding the regression of the US Supreme Court into a haven for corporate stooges. In Massachusetts, for example, courts have ruled that the state Constitution provides for various public rights within private malls (e.g., malls can't block people from getting signatures for petitions on their grounds). But with big, multi-state forums like Facebook, that state-level enlightenment isn't much use.
