SHARES
by Bari Weiss
Do your eyes gloss over when you see the words “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act”? Mine do.
Yet the subject of Big Tech’s might Should Facebook have the power to ban a president? Should Amazon have the power to ban the sale of a controversial book? Should Twitter have the power to permanently bar a user over a single tweet? And if not, what should the government be doing about it? is both fascinating and incredibly important.
I don’t think there is a group left in America who is happy about the power that companies like Facebook and Twitter and Google have arrogated to themselves. According to a recent poll from Vox and Data for Progress, 59% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans think Big Tech’s economic power is a problem. It’s hard to think of another issue with that kind of bipartisan consensus.
Summary The idea of rights is central to our moral vocabulary. Over the past century, however, the concept of rights has changed significantly: the original faculties-based natural rights doctrine is being replaced by a needs-based and dependency-based human rights doctrine. This change is best represented in the sharp contrast between rights claims expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. This shift in theory has and will continue to have broad practical consequences. The human rights view, in understanding human beings as needy and dependent rather than as distinctively capable of responsible liberty, leads to the endless proliferation of rights claims, which become self-negating. In a situation where everyone has a right to everything, there can be no justice. If the idea that we possess rights by virtue of our rational nature is to remain viable as the core of our understanding of justice, the identification of
This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.
On Monday morning, Justice Clarence Thomas all but endorsed a fringe legal theory that would sharply limit social media companies’ ability to moderate content on their own platforms, stripping them of their own First Amendment rights to dissociate with speech they dislike. This radical idea has no basis in the Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence but it is popular among Republicans who accuse social media companies of censoring conservative speech. Thomas appears to have waded into the fever swamps of right-wing paranoia and come out with the conviction that courts and Congress must bring Big Tech to heel by jettisoning basic constitutional principles. This view would seem to conflict with the justice’s belief that c
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