Which is why OP describes the U.S. enacting legislation creating a statutory right.
Well, that depends on who says you don't. If the government says so, they are wrong, because you do have a constitutional right enforceable against the government to post on Facebook.
The idea of saying "you don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook" is that you don't have such a right enforceable against Facebook.
Which is true. But under current US law, you do have a civil right enforceable against any public accommodation to be offered the same service that they offer to the public generally.
wouldn't that violate free speech though? forcing a company to keep something up/take something down is entirely up to them no?
Free speech does not cover scams and fraud, something that happens on their platform. Society doesn't take any action against them for publishing illegal content, scams, libel, fraud, because they aren't a newspaper. They're more like a newspaper printing house.
In my opinion they should probably be losing those protections and should suffer legal consequences for the content their users post. The moderation has reached a point where they ate defacto editorialising content.
An alternative to that could be opting in to some kind of third party moderation arbitration process.
Hi. You seem to be confused or uninformed. Check out this link[0]. IT should help.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
Aha, now this is an interesting distinction. I'm not an expert in this, as you might imagine, but what counts as editorialising?
To my naive eyes, having an algorithm that re-arranges posts, or injects new subjects seems like editorialising to me.
For practical reasons I think those algorithms are absolutely necessary. We need spam filters. A good line to draw would be "bring your own algorithm". A technical challenge to be sure, bit breaking up social media backend providers and content filtering seems like one of the only safe ways to allow these massive platforms to exist.
The algorithm can be just "Dan filters out spam".
At first, its just unsolicited commercial crap.
Then its non-corporate allowed unsolicited commercial crap.
Then its 'hide commercial crap in posts to deceive'.
Then its 'fuck over screen readers by aligning everything weird like FB to prevent finding commercial crap'
Then its "hey we can add these other non-spam categories (like Palestine) to silence them".
It's nothing new; the entire point of §230 is to provide protection to platforms that editorialize their content. Without editorializing, you have immunity anyway.
That's hilariously impractical. Just because you want to and can moderate some things doesn't mean you can guarantee rapid moderation of illegal stuff. When your platform is nominally open to everyone, and has millions of users, that just doesn't work out well.
just take away safe harbour as a whole. we dont need to subsidize the existence of Facebook and AWS and ISPs.
It's balancing the company's freedom of association against the individual's freedom of speech.
Look, the world criticised Facebook for facilitating a genocide in Burma [1]. There is a moral argument for American social media companies policing their speech to some degree. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't also be a process of appeal, data offloading, et cetera.
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Corporations are creations of the state and treating them as strictly private, especially when they're trampling rights, is illiberal horse-shit, and is straight up insulting when done under the guise of defending liberalism. And there's plenty of room for nuance, we don't have to (and already do not) regulate family businesses or 50-employee enterprises like we do transnational mega corporations with more capital than many entire countries.
Giant unaccountable companies privatizing the public square harms free speech. Forcing them to at least reveal why something was censored would help free speech more than it would harm it. Unless you subscribe to the myopic legalistic 1st amendment position that "free speech" is maximized when companies can act with the least restrictions, no matter how unable to speak or be heard that makes individuals, so long as it wasn't the government that silenced them.
Amazing how certain people do their best to ignore this, every single time.
Talk of what's in the constitution doesn't really matter. This person may seem not protected but a different government could go after meta for foreign influence.
It's also a lesson not to trust companies who have a global presence because they are as good as who they do business with.
A corporate charter is granted at the BEHEST of the People and the Government.
They are at best an artificial entity, and should be an extension of the laws binding government.
Frankly, the current situation of "You can say whatever you want legally (well, not really), but your job will fire you for it and youll end up in a homeless encampment". Yeah, thats real freedom.
So basically its real freedom for the Musks and Trumps of the world to sieg heil on stage, but fuck the citizenry for their attempt at speaking out.
There is a valuable discussion about whether those rules should be there. But as long as they are, enforcing them on all platform users is the just thing to do
oh, right, free speech. everyones allowed to do anything because they use their VOICE to INCITE harm and that's enough abstraction that others can't see the facade???
bull shit.
It's all "they're a private company, they can ban anyone they want" right up until they ban someone who promoters of that idea don't like. Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.
> Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.
with twitter, people did exactly what is intended - if you dont like it, make your own. now there is truth social and blue sky and threads.
people say twitter is run by horrible people, but nobody is restricting musk's rights to have a vanity project. its a right to speech, not to be liked
If they are NOT acting as an impartial aggregator and only censoring/deleting when the law demands, then they should NOT be covered under Section 230.
Thats quite simple.
the current law allows for impartial and biased/focused platforms to exist, so customers can access a variety of platforms and discussion fora.
in your proposal, something like banjo hangout couldnt exist as a platform focused on banjo picking, frailing, and building, because posts debating sailing vs rowing arent allowed
America has since decided to essentially forget about January 6th but there was a brief period of time where pretty much everyone figured Trump was toast. Impeached, removed, and probably set to be put on trial for serious crimes against the USA. I know the guy has a knack for escaping consequences but it came really close to happening.
He is a convicted felon and that’s despite these multiple criminal inquiries being scrapped due to his 2024 election win.
If he had lost the election, there is a high chance he could have been serving some kind of criminal sentence.
You also can’t wave the “free speech” thing around without understanding what the first amendment is about. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences, it’s freedom from the government controlling speech and the government giving you consequences for your protected speech.
That specifically includes the government not being allowed to police social networks on who they decide to ban or allow on platforms.
Facebook is legally allowed to be a liberals/conservatives-only social media platform if they want to be that. I’m even allowed to discriminate on hiring employees based on their political beliefs, it’s not a protected class.
Only americans believe that, this is almost as dumb as when they try to use dollars in Europe, "but it is valid tender I tell you!" or when they believe their TSA precheck works in China
https://immigration.ca/americans-frequently-caught-bringing-...
1: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/as-canadian-visits-to-t...
Everyone has a story about being stuck behind an irate American who can't understand why their currency isn't accepted abroad.
I've seen it in the UK - when a tourist tried to leave a tip in dollars for a bemused waiter.
That's quite different from trying to pay a bill (invoice) in USD in those countries.
It is very convenient for Americans. Depending on the parts of the world you've traveled it is easy to get the impression that the US dollar is a sort of universal currency.
Which isn't to excuse the people in your story. It is pretty easy to find out if US currency works where you are traveling.
All I can find which isn't enough (at least for me), to have an educated conclusion is the following:
Tweet re-tweeting Ahmed Shihab-Eldin:
"After weeks of trying to regain access to my @instagram account, which was temporarily suspended by @accessnow while I was wrongfully detained, I FINALLY got a backup code which allowed me to login only to receive this prompt that my account has been permanently disabled"
Access Now - that I can understand works for human rights. https://www.accessnow.org/about-us/
English Wikipedia:
"On March 3, 2026, Shihab-Eldin was detained by Kuwaiti authorities for resharing news articles about the Iran war;[13][17] the previous day, he had posted images of a U.S. fighter jet crashing over the country.[18] The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that he had not been seen publicly in Kuwait, where he was visiting family, since March 2, and that he was under arrest over accusations of "spreading false information," "harming national security" and "misusing his mobile phone;"[13][19] the incident occurred as part of a wider wave of crackdowns targeting journalists across different Gulf states amid the war."
Then mentioning his Kuwaiti citizenship was revoked on 29th of April 2026 and earlier some implicit hint? he was released. (though he's American born so I can assume he also has a US Citizenship unless he gave it away at some point)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Shihab-Eldin
https://www.ahmedshihabeldin.com/
I see he has been a journalist and activist over the years within context of the Middle East.
But if someone have more details about why he was blocked it would be much more helpful to understand this story.
Do not underestimate Meta for being purely immoral. I'm pretty sure they would assisted russians with persecution if they wouldn't now about potential backlash.
They are considered a terrorist organization by most countries, including their host country of Egypt.
Muslim Brotherhood is a coherent organisation, so we can meaningfully talk about its beliefs. Asking whether "Zionists" are fascist is as incohrent as asking if Antifa "believes" in anything. These aren't coherent organisations, just loose collections of aligned folks.
Fundamentally, nothing about Zionism strikes me as requiring fascism or religious supremacy (though it does require religious segregation).
I think it's fair to say the chances of Kuwait acting decisively against Zuckerberg, Musk or Cook is far higher than the EU.
So now there's no power, no money. Hence the attempts at message control. I don't think it's for Meta to soften their fall.
Whatever happened to just calling a country an ally? "Vassal state in the American hegemony" does sound a lot cooler I guess.
Kuwait's sovereign fund has about 1 trillion under management. A couple of phone calls about disposals and its surprising what changes.
However, its my understanding that this page was promoting/representing the Muslim Brotherhood.
Bad stuff. I know.
The US would "bow" to the requests of Kuwait, too. Because it's less "bowing" than that they don't care about you, and Kuwait now owes them a favor.
> if Elon or Bezos make a request, they'd get ignored
Not a chance. Elon and Bezos could probably tell Kuwait to kill somebody and they would.
[1] Really they're Meta's standards - it wasn't "the community" that wrote them.
Have you read them? they are acutally quite good. its a shame they are not enforced evenly.
And if they're so good, then Meta can take credit for them and call them "Meta's Standards", instead of gaslighting us into thinking there is some shared "community" that encompasses Kuwait and California and Belarus, and that this community has agreed on a single set of standards to be imposed on everyone across the globe.
I see this all the time in such cases - deflections about the legality of censorship, to avoid the issue that they want to keep the censorship itself, or the source of it, secret. "They" in this case being Meta, unless they produce a legal order compelling them to deceive us.