Social media ‘censorship’ and freedom of speech | Columns – The Mountaineer

My media law students often are stunned to learn their free speech rights dont apply to social media.

Why?

Because social media platforms are owned by private businesses, and the First Amendment protects you only from actions taken by the government.

These businesses Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. set their own rules and you agree to them when you establish your account.

They can change those rules as they see fit and your only alternative is to cancel your account.

They can suspend or cancel your account if you break those rules, as they have recently with President Trump.

Its not censorship, either, which the court defines as prior restraint by the government.

The Supreme Court has ruled many times that the government cannot take action that stops speech before it is published, with rare exceptions for national security, etc. The big case in this area was the Pentagon Papers case in the early 1970s.

But a private business can stop its clients and its employees from engaging in speech it disagrees with at any point.

This is the principle that allows a company to cancel contracts or fire people who express opinions that the owners of the company find repugnant.

But the courts have said the First Amendment means the government cant regulate the publics access to social media platforms.

In the case of Packingham v. North Carolina in 2017, the Supreme Court threw out a law that restricted social media access for convicted sex offenders, saying it violates free speech.

What is not quite so clear is the social media platforms responsibility when, and if, they try to edit or change content posted on their sites.

You may have heard about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects platforms from lawsuits over the contents of their users posts as long as the platforms dont try to edit those posts ahead of time.

Once they start editing them, then they are responsible for what they say.

As you can imagine, sites like YouTube, Facebook or TikTok get far too many posts to have any hope of editing or censoring them ahead of time, so they dont try.

But they can remove the posts later if they have violated their rules. And they can take action against users who violate their rules repeatedly.

Without the immunity provided by Section 230, however, Facebook, Twitter and the other large platforms likely would be swamped with lawsuits very quickly and forced to go out of business.

Dr. Carolyn S. Carlson is retired as director of journalism at Kennesaw State University and lives in Haywood County.

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Social media 'censorship' and freedom of speech | Columns - The Mountaineer