What a slippery slope. FreeRepublic is done if they rule that they can’t censor users for political opinions. A solution: IF the site is billed as open and non-partisan THEN no censorship. State your political preference affiliation and you can censor all you want.
“What a slippery slope. FreeRepublic is done if they rule that they cant censor users for political opinions. A solution: IF the site is billed as open and non-partisan THEN no censorship. State your political preference affiliation and you can censor all you want.”
A distinction could be made between those services having near monopoly power (e.g., Google, Facebook) and those that do not.
It is not the same. For one thing, FR does not have government recruiting pages. It does not have a marketplace. It does not host garage sales, pet adoption, etc. There are court cases (malls) for example where it was ruled that because the mall allowed a wide variety of activity and allowed military recruiters to set up shop, that the public areas (not individual stores) could not limit free speech activities. There are specific things that a private company / property owner must do and FB, Twitter, YouTube and Google have taken actions that meet the requirements of a public forum. They are the latter day town square, by their own actions.
I don’t agree with that. A single message board is not remotely comparable to a mega corporation that is effectively a monopoly over say videos (youtube) or search (Google) or tweets (twitter) or social media (facebook), etc. Sure other companies exist in those realms but they are minnows next to those whales.
If Free Republic utterly dominated all message boards on the internet and if the barriers to entry to start your own message board which could compete with FR’s domination of all internet message boards were high, then the comparison would be valid. It is not though - not even close.
What happens if you don’t state your political preference, but it is assumed based on algorithms?
FWIW, Facebook has me listed as “very conservative” based on things that I “liked”, not on anything that I wrote, because I’ve never written anything political on that website. In the past, I posted photos of me and family, or maybe wildlife photos that I’d taken. Once I saw that they designated me as “very conservative”, I stopped posting and reacting to other people’s posts. They lost me that day.
Why would Free Republic be "done" if liberals were allowed to post here?
Personally, I think Jim ought to let liberals post here. I don't think they'd enjoy it much. Liberals need safe spaces and filters. Their ideas can't stand up to scrutiny. They'd come here with their talking points and without the protection of safe spaces and speech codes and get demolished.
Free Republic would do just fine.