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UPDATE: The Constitutional lawyer replied:
Thanks for your note. I’m rather ambivalent about Section 230 which was needed when adopted far more than now. I don’t view as censorship every decision by a social media entity not to carry some posted material. Editing is what every newspaper does as is simply selecting what to print. Social media is in many significant ways different but in others the same. So I think some decisions by social media not to carry everything posted—false statements about medicines, for example—but sometimes unfortunate.
Written by Eric Zuesse
The U.S. is becoming increasingly totalitarian, which means that it is becoming increasingly in violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
“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 key clause there is the one barring censorship, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” since that clause enables “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” even grievances “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” so that its bar against censorship is its core, from which the remainder follows logically.
Today, I communicated to a prominent First Amendment lawyer, the following:
Would this be the most impactful First Amendment case?:
As you know, Section 230 (surviving from the illegal 1996 CDA) frees online publishers from being sued as offline publishers can be sued, for publishing information (especially political information) that is “objectionable” to an undefined someone, and for removing or refusing to publish information that the publisher “in good faith” considers to be “objectionable” (regardless of why). Unlike for offline publishers, all of the liability for online publishers is only upon the entity that had submitted such information (i.e., upon the author or author’s agent), not upon the publisher. Furthermore, Section 230 extends to online publishers the same right to censor whatever it wants to censor. The First Amendment has been, and is, interpreted as barring only censorship that is being done by the Government.
However, there now is an ever-spreading net of censorship (such as here and here), which some people fear is accelerating during the Presidential-campaign season; and, overtly it is being done only by non-Governmental entities, but there is extensive evidence that it is being encouraged by, coordinated with, and even being carrot-and-stick imposed by, the U.S. federal Government.
If we continue along this path, how can the outcome not inevitably be a totalitarian dictatorship in the United States?
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
