“the First Amendment is a cheap thing if all it provides is the assurance that one may say what a current majority is willing to hear.”
Charles Rembar
replies(3):
It’s gone. The ACLU itself is pretty anti free speech these days and happily looks the other way when censorship on private social media platforms aligns with their ideological views. People have been writing about free speech issues at the ACLU for about a decade now:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/is-the-aclu...
Now, they're uninterested in a lot of these issues.
And I say this as someone very liberal.
You can also separately debate where the line is on the topic of say "absolute free speech", but whatever the ACLU used to fight for, it fights for a distinct subset only, now.
You've got me thinking. I'm sure there's government pressure on social media to not carry certain posts, or allow certain human access. That's a pretty clear 1st Amendment violation. But it shades off. What about say, NSA using it's total information awareness feed of the entire internet to let HN know when a terms-of-service violation happened. Is that OK? What about if the NSA selectively notifies Truth Social of TOS violations? What if the NSA sends an official lawyer around to Facebook to get them to modify TOS a particular way? What if the DoJ sends someone to Paul, Weiss to get them to send someone else around (pro bono!) to hint that modifying TOS a particular way would be beneficial to Bluesky? What if Zuckerberg calls up Trump and asks him how he'd like TOS to read? I'm not sure where the line is.
The line is always where a criminal violation seems likely to occur, including criminal negligence. Otherwise the government has no business butting in, unless subpoenaed as a witness by a court in a civil matter.
Edit: I guess the government also has a right to respond if it, or its policies, are a target of criticism or lies. But it should do this in the court of public opinion, or in an actual court if said speech breaches criminal law or a civil tort. Though in the latter cases it would be held to the highest standard. It has no right to otherwise shut down anyone's speech regardless of where it occurs.
When trump was first elected I gave those guys like $300/month to fight the good fight against something I was told was a threat to my freedoms. The joke was on me though… because they very same set of people I thought cared about that stuff turned out to very much not care at all about literally anything they claimed to. They let the world burn to play politics.
In the end I wound up voting for trumps second term and will never ever vote for a single democrat again in my life. As for the ACLU, what a shame.
Nazi are popular now and sympatisants are political leaders. It is not their defense what defines freedom, it is everybody elses rights that define lack of it.