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by thisisweirdok 2677 days ago
No. Facebook the company can publish or not publish whatever they want. They can censor you all they want. It has nothing to do with free speech as outlined in the constitution (which again, protects individual people from government censorship).
1 comments

Somehow I must have typed my thoughts unclearly in my response above, because I agree 100% with everything you say immediately above (19171197). Facebook can censor whatever they want (IMO, private decisions on what to publish are inherently themselves a form of speech) and therefore the government is barred from censoring Facebook's publishing rights on First Amendment grounds.

If you take my suggestion (in 19168078), you end up with: "The freedom of speech is specifically protection from government censorship. E.G., If you're publishing <a site called Facebook> the government can't come by and tell you what to say in it. <Facebook> can publish (or not publish) anything they want." (For clarity, I agree with this 100%.)

The original post to which you replied (with expressed disagreement) said "The thing about strong free speech laws is that it protects facebook and twitter's right to censor." I also agree with that post 100%. It's your interleaved post's (19167743) first sentence in response to that ("You have a poor understanding of free speech.") that I disagreed with, given that that poster appears to hold the same point of view that you do immediately above.

I guess? it's a weird stretch. There's nothing specifically protecting what a business decides to censor other than the fact that the government can't engage in censorship.