I’m not familiar with the California constitution, but I’ll take it as a given that there’s some provision there that requires a business owner to allow people to exercise speech on their property. But that’s still not analogous to Facebook. If a shopping mall allows people to pass out pamphlets, the mall has no involvement with the speakers. If they simply take no action at all, the pamphlets will still be handed out. But Facebook does take an active part in distributing messages shared on their platform. They store the information on their servers, and transmit it over their bandwidth. That makes it, in at least some sense, Facebook’s speech, and so Facebook’s rights apply.
Nor do I think it would be appropriate to treat social media platforms as public utilities. The existing utilities have special status because material barriers to entry give them natural monopolies: To start a new water or gas company, you’d need to run pipes all over the city, and for a new phone or electric company, you’d need to run wires all over the city. To the extent that there’s a monopoly that needs to be busted, or at least more strictly regulated, it’s the ISPs. Which are often, in fact, the same phone company monopoly that the government should have broken up, but never meaningfully did (Ohio Bell was just as much of a monopoly, for an Ohioan, as Mama Bell ever was).
Same could have been said about Microsoft. Yet that didn’t stop the government from anti-trust actions. At some point companies get far too much power and then the state steps in.
Regional entities? While it made a modicum of sense to break up Ma Bell regionally, since it was a conglomeration of regional companies to start with, it makes NO sense wrt to an internet company.
How would Facebook be broken up regionally? Illinois Facebook, Cincinnati Facebook, New York New England Facebook, Pacific Facebook, etc.?
If I understand the story correctly, Infowars was banned due to violation of the terms of the sites. And in fact continued violation.
Now I’m sure I can think of some other online messaging site which can ban people for similar infractions. Give me time…
Newspapers and broadcasters routinely decide what reports to publish and which not. If any social media outlet applies any sort of moderation or rules of conduct they are a publisher and no longer a neutral platform like a phone system, and are therefore entitled to apply their own editorial criteria for publishing and not publishing. There’s nothing that says any medium has to publish whatever anyone else wants to use them to publish. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you’re entitled to require someone else to give you a megaphone.
Alex Jones is a terrible starting point for this discussion, because for all intents and purposes, these websites can trivially point out where he broke their rules in egregious ways. It’s like talking about free speech on the basis of a guy who led a lynch mob - there is, in fact, a line, and he’s definitely on the other side of it. If you’re worried about being censored like Alex Jones, here’s my advice: don’t run a 5-year-long harassment campaign centered on the parents of a grade school murder victim. Past a certain point, you cannot excuse speech as a political opinion.
Perhaps re-read the OP. It’s not about Infowars OR Alex Jones. It was merely an example to get the discussion going.
However, several posters have mentioned that the reason Infowars was banned was for rules violations. Now THAT would put this into a whole other category. I wasn’t aware that this was the reason given, though I recall that one of the social media sites, Twitter IIRC didn’t follow suit and ban Infowars, saying that he hadn’t violated any of their rules. If this is just a one off, where the companies in question are basically just enforcing the rules that are or were on their books, then I’d say that wrt Infowars they don’t have a leg to stand on.
But the broader question is more interesting, which is why I deliberately said this wasn’t about Infowars.
Yeah, I’ll have something to say on that when I’m off my phone. I think seeing sites like facebook as public utilities isn’t crazy, put it that way. I just don’t have a good outline of what that would actually look like.
No one NEEDS to use Facebook. Hardly anyone in my family does. Two of my cousins’ wives use it to share pictures of the kids/nieces/nephews because they live more than 1,000 miles apart, but that’s about it.
I’m having a bit of trouble with the OP’s premise. Why would someone who is an actual conservative be in favor of the government intervening to force a privately held company to provide services to someone? The question here could be paraphrased, “Should we, as a society allow corporations to control how they sell their own products, and if so, where will that end?”
Proposing a governmental takeover of large corporations (or doing so in all but name via micromanagement of such through draconian regulation) is antithetical to what I would consider to be conservative political viewpoint.
Someone who is tribal and considers Jones to be part of their tribe I could see proposing this. Someone who thinks that government should take an active role in reining in corporations more generally could make such an argument. But an actual conservative? This seems more like a CINO.
Well, a couple of things. First off, I’m not a conservative…I’m just perceived to be one on this board. I consider myself a moderate, swinging left on some issues and right on others. I don’t consider Alex Jones OR Infowars as ‘part of my tribe’ either. I also didn’t propose the government do anything…I ASKED what 'dopers thought. As for the question of the government taking over, it would depend on if this is, indeed a 1st Amendment question (which in my OP I said I don’t really see). Lastly, I don’t have a real issue with the government taking an active role in regulating corporations…happens all the time. Devil and details and all that, but in principle I don’t have an issue.
From a conservatives viewpoint (a REAL conservatives) I would be a CINO, as a lot of the really hot button issues for conservatives these days seem to revolve around abortion and gay marriage…and I’m definitely not a conservatives on any of that dippy social conservative stuff.
Facebook banning Infowars was a business decision, not a cultural one. They simply decided that whatever financial benefit they were gaining from carrying Infowars’ content wasn’t worth the potential revenue losses from the negative blowback.
Conservatives love to talk about keeping government out of business until a business does something they don’t like.
I do not think the couple wanting the cake asked for any message to be written on the cake. They just wanted a cake. To me that is a product and not speech. For example it would be akin to going to RayBan sunglasses website and designing a custom pair of sunglasses and RayBan saying they do not sell to gay people…sorry but feel free to buy a pair already made (assuming they somehow knew the person buying it was gay).