[rs23296008n1]

I'm feeling verbose today. So.

Demand is far too overstating it. And I'm not proposing or demanding it become law. There's a bunch of side-effects we might not like.

But let's go with it anyway:

Freedom of speech is different from freedom of the press. But both are linked because the amendment was written to allow for people to record their grievances to government via a free press. This is why free press was linked - people wanted their speech recorded in print and it was seen that government might legislate this out of existence or otherwise restrict it.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Notice that people can obviously operate a press without congress outlawing it.

Care to show me where a corporation gets free speech from? Not from that amendment. It comes from law around granting corporations the status of "legal person". This was necessary to allow a group of people to operate a business and have the business be liable, make contracts etc instead of the group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person

If you want to imply corporations have freedom of the press and therefore freedom of speech thats the only angle you have if you reject "legal person". Freedom of press is the ability to print. My fictional judge would accept that printed page as "from the corporate entity". But its still not speech: That judge would then ask the corporate entity to speak it.

As for a corporation actually being able to speak or print. The entity can own a printer. So it can "speak" via the press. But it can't actually talk without a proxy. No actual mouth nor was it born with one nor would it could presumably be seen to even possibly have been born with one. This covers the case where some clever lawyer might bring up exceptions for birth deformity as a reason for granting something without speech actual free speech.

But in reality its all moot: "legal person" is already a thing. And it overrides all of this. Until it doesn't I guess but that is unlikely.

The more astute would just say that any of these conditions would have to be put into law and the amendment prevents that. So, its still moot. Unless you determine that legal entities aren't actually people but only narrowly defined as people for particular reasons.

[Misdicorl]

I'm ignoring the legalese to make a distinction between a human and non-human person.

Corporations were granted free speech in a couple famous supreme court cases (NYT v. Sullivan, NYT vs. U.S.) and is not tied to the more recent non-human 'person' law.

The relevant question in my mind is how to protect Wikipedia and the New York Times and The Red Cross and ... from censorship by the government. There are very many organizations which speak in ways that the government would prefer they wouldn't- not all of them are traditional press, but many are.

Your proposal would allow the government to censor them all as they no longer have that protected right.

[rs23296008n1]

I would actually argue that wikipedia, newspaper like the Times etc are acting as a press. Therefore covered by the amendment's specific mention thereof. Don't even need to invoke the freedom of speech of those who did the actual writing. You still could however[1].

The ISPs aren't acting as a press, unless they wish to assert that their primary objective is to publish IPs and other metadata. That is fine as well but they should then lose protection as a simple carrier of data. They would also incur liability of what is published. I'm fair sure they wouldn't want that. They would scream "we're not a press we're a carrier!" to escape that liability.

This is similar to the postal service asserting that they are a press and then selling delivery details or even opening your letters and sharing their content. So, what business are they in? Publisher or carrier? I think it matters.

[1] The weaker fallback of a corporation using its employee's freedom of speech asserts that those employees are fully protected from the corporation. I doubt that is ever true. So in a real way the employees don't have free rein over their opinions and speech. Restricted speakers. I'd therefore not be relying on that. I'd want wikipedia etc protected under freedom of press instead.

[Misdicorl]

What about institutions which wish to speak but certainly aren't primarily press? The Red Cross, Unions, Universities, an activist bakery. Their freedom of speech (or press) is protected too. What distinguishes them from the ISPs?