If the government allows companies to buy all the avenues to free speech, do you really have free speech? For reference, North Korea has rights to freedom of speech and assembly. But it definitely does not mean they actually have that right.
So arguing that the façade of a private company being allowed to shut you down is somehow rational is nothing beyond absurd. If you cannot express your speech anywhere because a mob disapproves, you don't have freedom of speech. Freedom of Speech is not "Freedom to only listen to the things I want to hear." Otherwise there is no free speech, just what is culturally acceptable.
The solution to things like that (and we are nowhere near that) is antitrust law. But we are nowhere near that state today; the far right dominates talk radio and owns tons of local radio stations, and has Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN to get their message out, as well as lots of content on Facebook and Youtube even if those platforms ban some things.
Oh, I'm not saying it's rational. I'm pointing out that it's the current state of the neoliberal economic consensus. Companies can determine and who and what to amplify or block because Free Market fundamentalism outweighs human rights concerns, globally.
> the façade of a private company being allowed to shut you down is somehow rational is nothing beyond absurd
Indeed, it is, but that's where we are.
> a mob disapproves
In this case, it's not a mob. It's a handful of people who care more about making money than upholding rights.
> there is no free speech, just what is culturally acceptable.
"Yet if all cannot be of one mind—as who looks they should be?—this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate" - John Milton, "Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England", 1644 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/608/608-h/608-h.htm
Free speech has always been constrained by what is culturally acceptable.
You can't seriously be drawing parallels between Facebook and North Korea of all things. What could Facebook possibly do to prevent you from exercising your right to free speech and free assembly? If they have that power why aren't they using it to stamp out all of the various competing platforms that serve people banned from their own? This line of reasoning just doesn't make a lick of sense.
How can you exert your constitutional rights if the government allows companies to create/purchase/monopolize every avenue in which to express your rights? What if you had to pay a toll to utilize corporate paid sidewalks and roads? How could you protest the government? Likewise, the internet infrastructure we have today was created by the government, so it only make sense that the fundamental rights we have protected by the constitution be respected here as well.
I don't understand why many liberals defend a corporations freedom to silence speech but get angry when conservatives in the government do it. Six of one, half dozen of the other, it's still speech being silenced by someone more powerful than you. But one being a corporation and one being a politician doesn't change the fact that both limit freedom of speech protected by the constitution.
“ I don't understand why many liberals defend a corporations freedom to silence speech but get angry when conservatives in the government do it. ”
Because it’s a false equivalence that has nothing to do with being “liberal”.
The government has the power of coercion. No corporation has that by law.
In general, you are conflating the right to free speech with the privilege of easy armchair dissemination of one’s speech. Simply, your right to say anything doesn’t extend to forcing the world to disseminate and listen to what you have to say. Frankly, that extension is very much 1984.
In extremis, Trump has the means to publish a newsletter and nobody is stopping him from doing it.
If you have a right to bear arms, but no company in the country's sells a gun, do you have the "right" to bear arms?
The answer is: no you don't. Because the government enables these companies to do these things that enroach upon your rights while making people like you believe you still have said rights simply because it's not the government proper doing it. The government and through lobbying can influence and control a lot of what you do without legislation you know.
Every avenue? The right has Fox News, Newsmax, OANN, hundreds of local TV stations, and thousands of radio stations running conservative talk radio. They have no trouble getting their message out. On Facebook, most of the people with the highest engagement are right wing.
I keep finding winners of movies. Burn After Reading has been jumped up to my top 10 list just because of how benign and absurd it all is. A cool tragedy I think most people should see is "Into the Fade" with Diane Krueger and the drug addict from Babylon Berlin (dont know his name off the top of my head). A lot of mainstream "marvel-the-good-guys-win" type of people won't like it but if you want cold blooded reality it does it well.
High Risk != High Reward. There are far too many college educated people in the US that assume this. I walked in getting my degree knowing full well I was paying simply for the paper and the potential for getting a job in my field. I didn't walk in like I did the first time getting my associates degree believing I'd be making $50k upon graduation.
I personally feel like college institutions get way too much freedom to act as predatory as they do regarding student loans and education. So many 18 year olds are told to go to college and get a degree only to come out a 22 year old with no work skills or legitimate life experience unless they were fortunate enough to get an internship. Then they have to eventually either swallow their pride and work a garbage paying job for a while or get lucky working for somewhere that actually pays decently in wage and/or experience.
I'm currently a return student, and based off of the data my school collected for the 2019 year, the top majors were: Business Administration, Psychology, Biology, Organizational Leadership, and Nursing.
General business degrees are as worthless as english degrees. They don't teach you anything about actual business and you will not be able to just get a job. You'd have a better shot beating out external candidates applying from within at a low level position...almost every time. Psych and Bio, predominantly taken by females at my school (almost 80%). Again, another worthless field unless you go on to get a MS or Ph.D...of which none at this school do because it's a very low end state school. So there's another thing schools forget to mention about certain degrees. The next one is a general business degree for online transfer students at most schools in the area who just want to check off a "I have a Bachelors" box at application time. Then Nursing (again, predominantly women) which is actually a very hard field to pass but is basically a golden ticket to employment universally here. But that doesn't even hold a candle to those 4 ahead of it.
This base set of data shows that schools are marketing toward the undecided crowd or the people without the jaded understanding that real life can be a bitch. It doesn't care what you think should be the rules. And these schools take extreme advantage of it. Not to mention these schools get tax payer funding but have virtually no oversight as to how the school runs things. The head chair of my Comp Sci department is a guy with a Ph.D in physics! I know that's fairly normal, but it's pretty ridiculous that this guy is making decisions on us having to take an AI class over advanced database administration or making InfoSec students know OOP and programming.
Too many people believe those things are entitlements when in fact they are tradeoffs. Like half my high school graduating class dropped out of college or didn't even start and many make decent wages or have dual income with a significant other. Many of which own homes or live decently. None of which demanded free rent and a college education.
Many people think he still is. Even more people think he should be. There is a decent chance he will be again.
Even if none of that were true, his election revealed a lot about this country. He may be gone, but the people who voted for him are still there, and they are divided from those who didn't in a way much deeper than we're accustomed to. If you want to understand how that rift occurred and what you might do about it, you need to look at what they're thinking.
Because history is a dynamically evolving event, not something someone can 100% accurately predict just cause they read someone in a different era did something similar.
So arguing that the façade of a private company being allowed to shut you down is somehow rational is nothing beyond absurd. If you cannot express your speech anywhere because a mob disapproves, you don't have freedom of speech. Freedom of Speech is not "Freedom to only listen to the things I want to hear." Otherwise there is no free speech, just what is culturally acceptable.