In the wake of Zuckerberg’s testimony in DC last week (and Twitter’s weird press conference soon after), my brain has been going in loops around this topic, so why not blurt it out for everyone to disagree with!
I’ll start by saying it bluntly: the first amendment doesn’t apply to the internet. Before you start typing a response, let’s actually read the First Amendment…
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise there of; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Your first reaction should be to the opening; it’s explicitly about the creation of laws by congress. It doesn’t give you free-reign to say whatever you want without consequence. It also doesn’t mean social networks and start-ups have to let hate-speech live on their platforms. But, important to my point, it doesn’t say that companies have to enforce/allow free-speech.
And since companies own every part of our means to digitally communicate, and aren’t directly creating laws to abridge our freedom of speech (lobbying aside), the first amendment doesn’t really apply.
Social platforms are run by a company so we’re bound by their rules, not the constitution. Unless you have a server in the basement, your website has to follow the hosting company’s rules. Your internet connection is provided by a company, and they have rules too.
Each of these companies sets their own Terms and Conditions which you’ve agree to in order to use; we’re bound by T&C’s all the way down.
So, if Facebook chooses to ban or allow something, they build it into their T&C and just start enforcing it… by using their site, we’ve implicitly agreed to those rules, just like all the other rules we clicked through after speed-scrolling to the button at the bottom (like iTunes in the mid-00’s). But there are other means of posting and communicating online, so Facebook making stupid decisions isn’t the end of the world… we can use an alternative, like Mastodon. We can leave Gmail’s intrusive scanning and advertising for a paid-service like ProtonMail. And if we don’t want ISPs to sell our metadata, we can use responsible, well-researched VPNs to obscure those details about us.
None of those options are a silver bullet on their own, but when combined with one another, they start chipping away at a system that’s built against us.
We have the means to take back some of that power to regain a semblance of privacy and freedom… but the internet’s favorite amendment doesn’t protect us from shit. The most important decisions we make revolve around who we do business with, and how they make their money decides how we’re treated. If you’re not paying for something, assume you’ve been sold-out.
And, to quickly revisit my thesis, remember: there’s no such thing as free-speech online. So watch what you type, and rethink what apps you use, because the internet is not as free as it looks.
