[tptacek]

That law is an OTC anti-fraud measure. The Constitution has something to say about the ability of Congress to nationalize and impose its own speech controls on private websites that happen to become popular. Congress also doesn't get a say in who performs the Super Bowl Halftime Show, despite its immense audience.

[brhsagain]

If we’re going to assert the inalienable right of free speech, then arguably free speech is such an important cornerstone of society that we should think long and hard before letting any company have such influence in that sphere to begin with.

To me the big glaring central point here is that everyone uses big tech platforms. It’s just a fact of life. If you tell people, sorry, I don’t use Facebook, I use some wonky alternative instead, can you add me there? you’ll get weird looks. I think it’s insane to just ignore that elephant and continue studiously down the path of, well, they’re a private company and therefore are entitled to publish whatever they want.

When we established the precedent that private entities can say what they want, we clearly didn’t have Facebook in mind. Like there is just intuitively an obvious difference between a private journal deciding what to write about and a huge platform everyone uses deciding what to pass through or not. The state of the law doesn’t currently reflect this but that doesn’t mean the difference doesn’t exist.

[tptacek]

Who's asserting that "inalienable right"? You don't have the inalienable right to speak on any property I own. If you walk up to my porch or into my lobby and start yelling about ivermectin, I'm going to kick you the hell out, no matter what you think your rights are.

The actual right you have is spelled out in the Constitution: that Congress shall make no law abridging your freedom of speech. That's all you get. Thankfully, the framers did not add a law granting you the right to force me to amplify your speech with my own resources.

Get a blog! The very worst people on Earth have managed to keep blogs running.

[brhsagain]

Sorry, I'll back up a bit. I thought you were arguing that Reddit has the Constitutional/inalienable right to not have its speech compelled by the government. I agree, but I think the motivation behind that right has to be considered. Freedom of speech from governmental control is important, but the reason it is important is that open discourse is an important part of society. The pipes we use to perform that discourse are arguably a sort of "commons." I would argue that, that being the case, maybe we should think hard about leaving it to the control of private enterprises.

This really seems like a case where the existing categories in the law created hundreds of years ago are no longer adequate to capture present realities, similar to how they didn't have AR-15s in mind when they wrote 2A. If you ask whether Reddit is a public or private company, sure, it's private. But if you look at what intuitions back then were around "public" and "private", and for that matter around what "speech" was, it seems like the real answer is that (in regards to this debate) Reddit is a third type of thing that doesn't have a name yet.

> Get a blog! The very worst people on Earth have managed to keep blogs running.

This might illustrate my point better. I assume you don't support people getting banned straight off the internet. Is it simply because no one owns the internet, but Reddit is owned by Reddit (the company)? Maybe it's time for that boundary to be reexamined.

[tptacek]

Reddit is in fact owned by Reddit. The Internet is not in fact owned by any particular company. None of your logic coheres.

[brhsagain]

You are just telling me what the current state of the law is and how society is currently run. I agree that is the world we live in. I am making a prescriptive argument about how I think we ought to do things. Maybe my argument is weak; I’ll keep trying.

[tptacek]

My take is that the word "just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I'm not super interested in debating alternate constitutions; personally, I for the most part like the one we have. I might not be your best discussion partner on this.

[lmm]

"Private" corporations exist on the people's, via Congress', sufferance. Any entity benefitting from limited liability is not fully private and does not deserve the same rights as private individuals.

[yellowapple]

> "Private" corporations exist on the people's, via Congress', sufferance.

All aspects of a capitalist socioeconomic system exist on the people's, via Congress', sufferance. The very land on which you stand is - at the end of the day - the territory of some government (unless you live in international waters, in space, or in Bir Tawil), and said government carves off subsets of that land for its people to use as they see fit.

Fortunately, we the people here in the US have already long decided that "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." Those rights are not conditional on whether an entity is an individual person or a limited-liability corporation or an anarcho-syndicalist commune or what have you.

[tptacek]

Yeah, that's not how any of this works.