Wow. In other threads I always thought you were well read and a good debater. But to imagine that any company has a first amendment obligation is so basically incorrect that I am stunned to see you write that.
I have given it much thought, and I do not make such a claim lightly.
It is "basically incorrect" insofar as we have always been told the 1rst amendment applies only to government. We do not have to accept what we are told, especially when we have a very powerful interest in refusing to accept what we are told.
Can we agree that the intent of the framers was to prevent censorship of the public?
Can we agree that at the time, the only entity which would have been thought capable of censoring the public was the government?
The framers saw the threat of government censorship as dangerous to the Republic, and they therefore forebade it.
If government censorship is dangerous, is not the same thing true of any censorship that is the equivalent in scope to government censorship?
And now experience has shown us that *IF* private entities are permitted to censor opinions the government(S) don't like, (more than one government is currently doing this) then that government can simply apply pressure to the "private entity" and coerce it into censoring whatever the government wants censored.
It *IS* government censorship through proxy.
Google routinely censors whatever the Chinese government demands, not just there, but over here too. And now we have the German governments telling these big tech companies to censor this and that, and so too do we have other countries in Europe doing this.
If you allow private corporations to censor American speech, you have effectively given every nation in the world veto power over anything Americans say. All any nation has to do is threaten the interests of these corporations in their countries, and they can curtail American speech over here.
As for the legal end of it. People are too caught up in black letter law and not sufficiently comprehensive of the intent and purpose for which the law was created. People can interpret the words to mean something not intended.
In this case, we have people strictly reading the words of the 1rst amendment to mean something the founders would not have agreed to tolerate, which is Censorship of the American people.
To interpret the 1rst amendment into allowing censorship, you have rendered it effectively repealed. It serves no purpose if governments can censor by proxy, because whomever has control of American communications can always be arm twisted by the government, usually covertly.
And lastly I want to talk about the sheer danger of allowing things to continue as they are. This thread's headline should give you an idea of one aspect of that. Many of us believe we have been misled and lied to about the "vaccines." (experimental gene therapy) We believe we have been lied to about it's effectiveness in preventing COVID 19, and about the potential dangers of it's side effects.
This censorship by Facebook at the behest of the "vaccine" companies may have caused the deaths of thousands of people. And do not think for a moment that the government isn't connected into the middle of this whole thing.
What I see is this. If we do not stop this censorship business, we will see the fascism problem in this nation get worse.