Well, Benediktson Computer is once again in its Southwest office in Silver City, New Mexico. Yes, we were chased out of Montana by snowstorms and luckily made the trip safely with no major challenges or issues. I want to try and tackle a difficult topic for me; it has to do with what folks are calling a violation of their right to free speech. I may have a unique perspective on this topic.
First off, the right to free speech is not one that is provided by our government, the bill of rights (first amendment) protects us from infringement of this right by the government. I know there have been some appellate court decisions that appear to have broadened the scope of this protection; but, I am not aware of any high court decisions that have broadened this protection to the point that we are protected from censorship on private lands, services, hosts and so forth.
So, to be clear, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are private services hosted by corporations (presumably for profit) on privately owned and operated servers. Any act of censorship, restriction of content, or removal of content may be annoying; but, it in no way is a breach of anyone’s rights. If (and this is a big if) our government were to offer a similar type of service, then the first amendment might offer us some protection against content censoring on that service.
In addition, private groups hosted on any of these corporate services (please do not make the mistake of considering them government-sponsored or supported) have been given considerable freedom to choose what content they find acceptable (within the framework of the hosting service) and this may be quite a bit more restrictive in many ways (all of this without violating anyone’s rights).
As each of us joined (Facebook for example) we were offered a chance to view and then required to accept and agree to the terms of service for that service. While I will entertain the notion that there are some rights and priveledges of being an American Citizen that we simply cannot sign away, this, in no way, applies to content that we publish onto privately or corporately owned and operated services. One last point, when we publish content on a service (like Facebook) we are making that content public on that privately operated service, potentially causing the owners of that service to be responsible for that content (legally).