“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 First Amendment, the first in a series of ten amendments that prevent the federal and state governments from infringing on our rights to express ourselves via religion, speech, and groups that we form. It is from this that we have press companies that have a wide range of views and opinions. What are the limitations?
When talking about the Freedom of Speech, we often hear about “You cannot shout ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater falsely.”, yet that is not true. The Atlantic had an article from the 4th of January 2022 about this exact idea. The author Jeff Kosseff had this to say:
“In fact, you usually are allowed to do that without fear of arrest, lawsuits, or other legal consequences. Shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater, a metaphor that dates to a 1919 Supreme Court ruling by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., is widely—and wrongly—held to be a far-reaching exception to the First Amendment, which offers broad protection to free expression in the United States.”
This was later challenged and changed by the Brandenburg v. Ohio case, and many people disagree with this case just because of who Brandenburg was, a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The case involves a reporter recording and reporting on the Klan meeting. After the meeting and reporting the state was trying to punish the Klan members that were known.
Of course, the rhetoric was racist in nature, but it did not call for direct violence or imminent lawless actions. This is, of course, why you are allowed to shout fire in a theater. People still do not agree with decision in the Brandenburg case due to the offending of civility, I think. So I have been thinking lately “Why do we fear free speech so much in Western Society?”
A large part of why we fear it is the fear of offending the sensibilities and civility of our society. You can see this in cancel culture and how they try to shut down people for wrong speech and wrong think. That is to say that we are afraid to hear opinions that go against our indoctrinations, both from the political left and political right.
Politics is slowly becoming the new religious field of war, or the current time period’s Crusades. Too often we see people losing jobs, gigs, venues, and even worse family members over something as a difference of opinion. Though this is not new in human history.
Just go back to 1936 when King Edward VIII abdicated his throne to be with the woman he loved. Why? She, Wallis Simpson, was a divorcée! Scandalous, I know. Yet we have as a society, not learned to talk about the taboo. Could King Edward VIII been able to run the country effectively? Sure, though he did not want to really. And then there were the rumors of Simpson’s Nazi sympathies. Just rumors, but in that time and even now rumors are enough to ruin a person socially.
Speaking of rumors, let’s fast forward to the 1950’s and the era of “McCarthyism” and how rumors were used here. Now there were some good leads that came from this, but many were just rumors and that had an impact of ruining lives that should not have been ruined. The first targets of Sen. McCarthy were federal employees, then moved on to America at large to include Hollywood. We just look to people like Ronald Reagan and Walt E. Disney confirming to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that several people and groups did have Commie sympathies. The following is from a Times Magazine article from 2014 about the McCarthyism era and how wound-up society was.
On the other hand, ten screenwriters and directors refused to testify, arguing that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guaranteed the freedom to belong to any political organization they chose. Congress didn’t see it that way, and a month later the men were cited for contempt and ultimately sentenced to a year in prison each.
To think members of Congress actually convicting people because they refuse to testify or self-incriminate, I wonder what other amendments were violated?
Now we are seeing the reverse of this in society today. Instead of Congress attacking people for being Far-Right Fascists (ignoring the ongoing Jan. 6th hearings) we have Hollywood elites attacking politicians and everyday Americans for not believing their social narratives. You have people interrupting a Justice of the Supreme Court’s dinner at a restaurant, not because they were directed to by Hollywood elites directly, but by the continuous assault on their sensibilities by the elites and the Congressional cronies, like Maxine Waters.
Rep. Waters in June 2018 gave a speech, which while on the face of it is promoting the First Amendment, it can be viewed as incitement of harassment. A link to the Washington Post video about this will be down below. What purpose does it serve to have everyday Americans see a member of the then Trump administration set upon them? To redress grievances?
Ultimately no, in my opinion. They just wanted these officials harassed but not in a way where it looks like they incited it. If Trump or Dan Crenshaw pulled a stunt like this, you know that the media and the Democrat members of Congress would have a fit over an incitement to harass duly vetted members of the federal government.
No this is not to say people do not have the right to protest at all. It is not to say they cannot meet up to chant things to politicians, justices of the courts, or any other government officials. What I am trying to say is that there are societal decorums that we still have in place that should be respected. EVEN GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS are entitled to a private life. This is true for all current and past members of Presidents’ families, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and justices of federal courts.
I do not agree with a lot of what my current members of Congress do in the halls of Congress. Shall I gather a group of people and follow Sen. Patty Murray around to the public places she eats at, shops at, gets her fuel from, just to protest my opinion of the job she is doing? No. That will only turn people against my cause.
Now that I am done with that tangent, let us get back to the overall premise that I wish to discuss, Freedom of Speech. Again, while the Constitution is supposed to protect us from both State and Federal levels of government, it does not protect us from each other. There are defamation laws that help in that area, but they can be tricky to navigate. Then there is social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube (YouTube is social in the sense that we can comment and have back-and-forth conversations in comment sections or reply videos).
Social media platforms are where I see the most insane banter back-and-forth on free speech. In part this is due to the fact that people talk on platforms like Twitter constantly. The people that are opposed to sharing of ideas freely (both good and bad ideas) tend to be the ones that support cancel culture and the censoring of people on these platforms. Their main argument or comeback is “They are private companies and can do what they want with their product.”
Which is in fact, true. We do not have First Amendment protections from private companies unless that private company is running a city or township and are in fact the government. Just look at Marsh v. Alabama in which the putting up of religious literature on the sidewalk of a company-owned town, which violates the company’s regulations for town management. So this then brings up the challenges of those the censoring of people online.
“(Insert social media platform name here) is acting like the online public square of any town. Therefore, it should be regulated by the government.” Well that went nuclear quickly, and I have to say I have said it before and probably will again though not for the same misguided reasons. The main point is that they want to compare social media to the public square, which they are not. I still have the right to go downtown and chant and speak my opinion and there is little the police can do. So is Twitter a public square?
No, but if you are a politician and have an account on there, make sure you use the official one for your official work not your personal account. Just look at what happened to Donald Trump early in his presidency. He was banning people off of his personal account, the very same one that he posted all his major talking points from the White House. Well you cannot block people their Constitutional right to redress their grievances to you, the government, from your personal account if you are using it for State purposes.
Another line of conversation is treating social media as a utility like telephones were back in the day before the internet. As they were the quickest and easiest way to communicate with people, telephone companies could not not provide you with services if your personal life did not align with their company ideologies. Sadly (and gratefully) Twitter, Facebook, and the like are not required to get jobs. The only social media platform that runs this risk right now is LinkedIn and I have yet to hear of them removing people for ideological reasons, yet.
Do I see a day when things like Facebook at least become more of a utility than they are now? Yes. Simply many people are moving away from Facebook but are still in the Meta ecosystem with Instagram. Facebook for some is a great way to stay connected with family and friends. It can allow you to create groups for all sorts of reasons, such as a cruise group that I am a part of. There may well be a day when employers will ask for the Facebook profiles for your references. I hope that day never comes, but it may come.
I know this has been a bit of a tangent as well, but the point was to show that there are to main arguments and rebuttals that it makes for a circular argument that goes nowhere. Twitter bans person X. Person Y takes issues with this because of free speech. Person Z takes issue with person Y. They discuss the issue but come back to Twitter was founded on free speech, but they are a private company so they can ban whomever they wish, but Twitter is the only large user-based platform for short-response content and therefore should be held to the First Amendment. So as you can see that social media platforms are private companies that can and do exercise their business rights whether we agree with them or not. But should they?
My answer is a fence-sitting maybe. These companies are afforded protections from the speech posted by others on their sites, known as Section 230(c) of the Communications Decency Act. They are only afforded these protections as “Good Samaritans” by blocking and restricting access to (c)(2) Civil Liability:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
The items in (A) can be legal defined, sometimes, but are more commonly seen as subjective as many offenses that cause hurt feelings or even sensibilities are not the same universally in a society. What offends you might not offend me and vice versa, that is not to say there are no actions that should not be talked about, filmed, or animated available to everyone, hence media rating systems. Though platforms and companies should have the option of putting things behind paywalls and in the case of truly illegal acts, of course not posting them is fine.
Just because people like Carl Benjamin, Daisy Cousens, Konstantin Kisin, or Tim Pool say something or talk about something you disagree with does not mean they should be booted from Twitter or any other platform. Speaking of Carl, a.k.a. Sargon of Akkad, is what he said in a tweet to MP Jess Phillips back in 2016 so bad that he should have been suspended? No, as anyone can see the context of the tweet, he was making a joke. A poor joke, that is debatable, but a joke none the less.
What about people like Dr. Kristi Winters, Clementine Ford, Kevin Logan, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Do you think they should have their voices shut down on social media? I bet the answer is no. We should be able to have discussions on nearly all topics that do not break criminal laws. Sure, if YOU do not want to partake in a discussion with someone then mute or block them. It is not on Twitter, Facebook, or any platform to cater to your whims above all other users, just as they should not cater to my whims over others.
One thing I want you to consider is how social media influences or tries to influence us. Take a look at the poorly written and researched Alternative Influencer Network (AIN) report and then look at Mark Ledwich’s analysis of the report. Links below. I find the AIN report to bad attempt to classify everyone the author dislikes or distastes as “Right-Wing” politically. Just because we disagree politically does not make us enemies. Although in current year, I find this to be sentiment that most people would not agree with me on.
I know this has been a lot of tangents and going on about one side versus another side, but I hope that it has you thinking about one of the most cherished freedoms guaranteed by the United States Constitution. The problem is that we, as a society, won’t abide by this tenant of our culture in our personal, public, and private conversations. We feel a need to either censor others drives us to feel we are making a difference for the greater good, or to self-censor because of the backlash of losing a job, friends, or even family for wanting to discuss what we believe.
We need to slow down the rhetoric on what topics should not be talked about, whom can talk about a topic, and if you are not one allowed to talk about a topic then why are you trying to talk about it. We need to realize that to get ahead of bad ideas, we need to have free and open discussions about them, even if the consensus is that those ideas are bad. We obviously have yet to learn from history that repressing dissent will lead to the downfall of the dominate ideology. Eventually the dam will burst and all the bad ideas are going to bubble up like a super volcanic eruption and we will be right back to days of true patriarchy, enslavement, and true Stalinism.
WaPo Video about Maxine Waters:
AIN Report to download:
Mark Ledwich Analysis of AIN report:
https://mark-ledwich.medium.com/we-have-been-misled-about-non-pc-youtube-b6ffea5e34fa
More in depth look from Mark and his co-research Anna:
J Brown Media 
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