"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."
The first amendment does not apply to private property, such as Facebook. That is the problem. I do not use Facebook, and am really appalled by its success and the dependency it has fostered, but it is what it is, a publicly-traded private corporation that runs a wildly successful information exchange. Since the government does not own or operate it, the First Amendment does no apply to their operations or conduct.
I worked in the regulated public utility sector while in law school and I sometimes think that the public utility model of regulation might be applied to Google's search engine to assure that thumbs are not on the scale of returned results. There you can say that 97% of online searches are conducted using Google and that monopolistic status invites abuse, and to combat abuse we impose regulation. For Facebook its a less strong argument.
Nope a private company cannot discriminate against race, religion or sex.
It’s the same reason why they are even shutting down prayers in public schools. For instance,a high school football team doing it.
Look at the part where first Amendment says, that congreee shall not prohibit the free exercise of... Then how are they allowed to ban prayers on high school football team?
trump needs to go teddy roosevelt on they asses.
The government didn't own and operate lunch counters either, but they decided they should have a say in making certain citizens had a right to sit at them.
We are now at a time where the dominant form of speech in this nation is carried by private companies, and now they are moving in a lockstep. It is effectively just as bad as government controlled speech, because it has the exact same consequence.
See Marsh v Alabama. Facebook has 1.6 BILLION members (supposedly) worldwide, making it the most public forum that has ever existed. Free speech rights exist in such a space. Just need the right court ruling to confirm that.
“The first amendment does not apply to private property, such as Facebook.”
Can AT&T demand that you can’t have phone conversation supporting Trump?