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To: semimojo
Which would mean the first amendment no longer obtains.

Stop. Just stop. Goolag, Fascist book and Twatter can say anything they d@mn well please. What they cannot do is operate a public communications company and only allow some people to use it.

36 posted on 05/29/2020 8:49:15 PM PDT by DiogenesLamp ("of parents owing allegiance to no other sovereignty.")
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To: DiogenesLamp
What they cannot do is operate a public communications company and only allow some people to use it.

Well, that may or may not be true for a "public communications company", whatever that is, but it's clearly not true for private actors like Alphabet, Facebook and Twitter.

It's trivially easy to find case law upholding this principle. As an example, from the Prager U case:

"Despite YouTube’s ubiquity and its role as a public facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment. Prager University (“PragerU”) sees things differently and claims YouTube’s outsize power to moderate user content is a threat to the fair dissemination of “conservative viewpoints and perspectives on public issues,” and that YouTube has become a public forum.

PragerU runs headfirst into two insurmountable barriers—the First Amendment and Supreme Court precedent. Just last year, the Court held that “merely hosting speech by others is not a traditional, exclusive public function and does not alone transform private entities into state actors subject to First Amendment constraints.” Manhattan Cmty. Access Corp. v. Halleck, 139 S.Ct. 1921, 1930 (2019). The Internet does not alter this state action requirement of the First Amendment."

I realize you don't agree with this and wish it wasn't the state of the law, but it is. Just asserting that it isn't makes you look unserious.

You want to take away the first amendment rights of the techs because you think they discriminate against your viewpoint. Unfortunately for you that's not how the Constitution works.

There's nothing wrong with not liking some of the implications of the Bill of Rights but the answer isn't to just pretend it doesn't exist.

38 posted on 05/30/2020 10:02:49 AM PDT by semimojo
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