‘Shadow State’: Embracing corporate governance to escape constitutional limits | TheHill

If successful, corporations will manage a system of barriers and penalties to isolate the vaccine-hesitant into smaller and smaller spaces of existence. Citizens would find it increasingly difficult to be able to travel or dine out unless they meet the demands of corporate policies.

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The political convenience of relying on corporate controls is most evident in the support for a massive system of corporate-based speech controls now implanted in the United States. The government cannot implement a censorship system under the Constitution but it can outsource censorship functions to private companies like Facebook and Twitter. Just this week, the White House admitted it has been flagging misinformation for Facebook to censor. At the same time, Democrats like Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) have demanded that Big Tech companies commit to even more robust content modification an Orwellian term for censorship. Liberal writers and media figures have called for corporate censorship despite the danger of an effective state media run through private corporations. Even Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced the First Amendment right to freedom of speech being weaponized to protect disinformation.

The public is now required to discuss public controversies within the lines and limits set by corporate censors with the guidance of the government. Twitter barred reporting on Hunter Biden s laptop until after the 2020 election. Facebook only recently announced that people on its platform may discuss the origins of COVID-19, after previously censoring such discussion but it still bars opposing views on vaccinations and the pandemic. Other companies actively block wayward thoughts and views; last week, YouTube was fined by a German court for censoring videos of protests over COVID restrictions. Meanwhile, Twitter censored criticism of the Indian government meant to expose mismanagement of the pandemic that is costing lives.

The common refrain from the left is that corporate censorship is not a limit on free speech because the First Amendment only addresses government limits on speech. That not only maximizes the power of corporations but minimizes the definition of free speech. Free speech is not exclusively contained in the First Amendment. It includes the full range of speech in society in both private and public forums. Yet, liberals who once opposed the recognition of corporate free speech rights in cases like Citizen s United  are now great advocates for corporate speech rights, in order to justify the censorship of opposing views.

Social media companies are not just any businesses, how

via thehill.com

This is really bad. I guess a few academics who don’t really care if they are reputed to be right (or left) wing cranks, who still work under the old dispensation of tenure contracts and AAUP rules, will be among the few people who are allowed to say what they actually think (including, semi-demi-famously, that the notion promoted by the Chinese government that the coronavirus had to have a natural rather than a lab origin was a lot of c*ck swaddle). The only solution I see to this problem is legislative, not because there is no Constitutional problem with corporate speech codes and the like, but because our courts are unlikely to protect free speech and a free society.