Yes, I agree with you fundamentally. However, freedom of speech was enshrined in our Constitution in the First Amendment and has been consistently protected by the courts, ensuring that the government cannot restrain it except in narrow cases. The Executive Branch of our government is charged with taking care to faithfully execute the laws of the land, which includes protecting our freedom of speech. From wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org
the First Amendment operates to protect the inviolability of "a marketplace of ideas", while Associate Justice Thurgood Marshallcogently explained in 1972 that:
[A]bove all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content. [Citations.] To permit the continued building of our politics and culture, and to assure self-fulfillment for each individual, our people are guaranteed the right to express any thought, free from government censorship. The essence of this forbidden censorship is content control. Any restriction on expressive activity because of its content would completely undercut the 'profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.' [Citation.] See the part I bolded? This was written in reference to the need to restrict government control over the content of free speech. But no one has anticipated that corporations would become so powerful and their platforms would come to so dominate the dissemination of information, as to become a fundamental risk to the "marketplace of ideas". The part I bolded above should equally apply to corporations. Our laws have not caught up to the increase in power of corporations and their platforms as a marketplace of ideas. It's a real problem. In this case, government isn't the problem. The monopolies of Google and Facebook are. |
