You know the first amendment doesn't apply to people right? It's a restriction on what the government can or can not do. The government can't restrict your free speech. Your employer can. Twitter can too, and that's what Elon is against.

I agree that he could have just ignored them, but he chose to ignore them completely by getting them out of his company. That's his choice.

As far as the 1st amendment goes: correct.

I really wish we'd stop defining social media broadly as a first amendment issue. Elon Musk has the right to speak his mind without fear of government reprisal, he doesn't have a constitutional right to broadcast his asinine opinions to millions of people.

We already have free speech and consequences. Twitter and Musk have nothing to do with free speech issues.

You want absolute freedom of speech but then you want to limit a company and platform in what it says, which it does by allowing or disallowing certain content? And you would prefer a single person, who has a history of devious activity, having totalitarian control over said company and platform? It doesn’t make sense.

How do you propose to do that, if you can't hold reddit, twitter et al accountable for the same today?

I highly disagree with that. Limits on free speech has always the goal consolidate power or having the prerogative of interpretation. Musk is an exception here and it isn't even clear how serious he means it. He will comply with laws and maybe do a snarky tweet. How terrible... Maybe he forces users to identify themselves and milk them dry. Who knows? Maybe he becomes a ascetic and donates all his riches to the preservation of penguins.

But restricting speech is a tool of the powerful because nobody else could restrict it in the first place. I don't know how these contradictory ideas are even able to spread...

Economic regulation on the other hand is entirely different here of course...

Not really, but free speech goes hand-in-hand with free association. Musk obviously has the prerogative to ban people.

> do you also support banning anti-vaxx misinformation at the height of a societal health crisis?

Nope, but again it's their perogative.

> do you support calling Musk out on his hypocrisy here?

I don't particularly care.

At the end of the day, free speech is the foundational freedom in the US. It's the 1st amendment for a reason. There's no use in arguing against it, it's an ultimate virtue whether people support it or not.

Clearly a private company do whatever it wants, BUT free speech is an ideal and Twitter should nevertheless try to uphold it, as the de facto public square on the internet.

Is that a bad thing?

The worst a company can do is drop your account - they can't even stop you from moving your content elsewhere. Governments can have you killed. Governments should be more restricted than the common citizen or even corporation.

Entirely.

But... man I’m not so sure as many people believe this as they should. Can we not ignore that as soon as these tech companies get monopoly status, they close their fists in more every day? Something has to give.

We would (should) not accept that someone with “wrong” views be denied a bank account or to shop at a grocery store. Why does government need to step in and whitelist which services are protected?

When are we going to be honest that none of this is about protecting people, but protecting ideas? The idea my political wedge issue is correct, so I’ll ban anyone that disagrees. The idea that I should be allowed to run a monopoly, eating and smashing any potential competitors?

None of this is about Black Lives or Covid or Elections. That’s the cover to get the thing they really want. Agreement with ideas you have or that keep you in power.

Moving the goalpost. Nobody claimed private companies should ignore government sources.

You asked about “the government tell[ing] private platforms what speech is acceptable.” That would be a First Amendment violation.

> What would government restriction on speech look like if not soft (effective) influence on big media companies?

Flippantly: Russia.

Less flippantly: freedoms exist in balance. Taking an absolutist stance on individual speech curtails freedom of association. In practice, I suspect it will make most social media unusable in its current form. (Which may be for the worst.)

No, why would they do that?

> After all, the government isn’t guaranteed free speech

Twitter is a private organization. There is no such thing as "free speech" in the private world.

A private company cannot and should not police the President’s speech.

However, it can and should (insofar as it does for other users) police the President’s use of that company’s platform for speech.

The alternative is systematically favoring the government against opponents in a way which makes Twitter a de facto government propaganda arm.

As far as I see, the largest danger to free speech in the US is company policy makers. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook ban all and everything without any suggestions from the government. And media like NY Times also do self-censorship without any government intervention.

I'm getting pretty tired of this line. The American first amendment is not the same thing as the freedom of speech. People who value the freedom of speech aren't making arguments against these companies based on the law, they are stating this is a deterioration of liberal values.

Furthermore, the argument is that no corporation should have these powers that they do, thus the need to regulate or break up the large tech companies.

Thats depends.

For example, in california, private shopping malls are required by law to allow political speech and protest.

This is the case even though they are a private company.

There are absolutely all sorts of ways that private companies can be forced by the government to allow certain speech.

Go look up robin vs pruneyards.

And we can make even more laws that are similar to that existing one that forces private companies to not ban certain speech.

It is an unacceptable form of censorship to hand over our modern day equivalent of the public square to private companies, and then allow them to police what people say in it.

Freedom of speech was always intended to be protected in public. The Internet is now our equivalent of the public space. It is time this problem is solved once and for all, and the Internet is now reclassified as both a public utility and a public space.

Yes, those of us with technical know-how can argue that personal websites are that equivalent. But this is depriving those that see Twitter, Facebook, et. al. as a public platform, of the right to have their voice heard. A tweet is now the equivalent of a placard on the street. Do we really want to censor that because we messed up in how we allowed the Internet to be run?

Yes, isn't this obvious? Freedom of speech protects you from government suppression, that's it. It doesn't mean anybody has to respect what you're saying, and it doesn't mean you get to force anyone to broadcast your message.

My apologies for misinterpreting you. I was interpreting the statement as talking about Elon and Media Matters disagreeing on some factual claim, which (basically?) hasn't occurred yet.

> If someone slanders you, the law is what you use to deal with the problem. > > This case has nothing to do with the First Amendment.

The case has everything to do with the First Amendment. The First Amendment limits the restrictions/consequences that can be placed on speech by laws, so if some speech is protected by the First Amendment then you can't use the law to deal with the problem.

What Elon is complaining about here is undoubtedly the type of speech that the First Amendment can protect. Therefore, the very first hurdle he will have to cross is convincing the judge that the First Amendment does not apply. If it does, nothing else matters.

(Well, maybe venue issues will cause problems for the lawsuit first, but the First Amendment would be the first substantive issue).

> This is what puzzles me. Why doesn't everyone want our media organizations to be truthful?

It's a nice-sounding sentiment that's easy to agree with in the abstract, to be sure, but it's running up against multiple factors that don't exactly incentivize it and it's going to be extremely difficult at best to change that, if it's even possible at all.

Not to mention there's a distinction to be drawn here between societal/cultural/etc. enforcement and governmental enforcement of the ideals you wish were adhered to. It's not without reason that the First Amendment is as broad as it is, after all...

I don't see why this is the case. Private entities are made of people. If Twitter vehemently disagrees with something, I don't see any reason why the government should force them to go against their wishes.

> very broad category that encompasses everything

This is exactly the problem. While there is an argument that Twitter was wrong in the specific case, the implications of having the government force Twitter to say/amplify things they don't believe are __chilling__. Restricting speech is bad enough, but often understandable, this is frankly several steps beyond what I'm comfortable with.