People are really confusing a free speech issue with a first amendment issue.
It's not a first amendment issue because the first amendment only forbids the government from censoring speech, and private companies are not the government.
However, it's still a free speech issue, and it's still a censorship issue. Just not a first amendment issue.
Private companies can still censor and can stifle/forbid free speech.
> People are really confusing a free speech issue with a first amendment issue.
No, people disagree on the meaning, scope, nature, and purpose of “free speech”, despite agreeing that “free speech” is a good thing.
It's true that the First Amendment (especially when combined with incorporation under the 14th) directly embodies a reasonably close approximation of one of the viewpoints of what free speech is all about, while simultaneously looking like a narrow special case of one of the other viewpoints.
But the nature of the disagreement here is not confusion between a principle and a legal embodiment of that principle, but a fundamental clash of beliefs about the nature of the named principle.
Let's be clear here, it's not that they don't want content on their platform: it's that content blatantly violates their rules.
Encouraging the harassment of families of school shooting victims is pretty heinous, and not something I'd want affiliated with my brand. I also wouldn't want my brand to become a platform for someone who perpetuates conspiracy theories that cause true believes to pick up weapons and become terrorists, simply because that's how he makes a buck.
After all, both Google and Twitter have spent close to a decade silencing religious extremists on their platforms. Where were the free speech advocates when fundamentalist Muslims were silenced on Twitter and couldn't use the platform to spread their message?
Yeah, I equated the two concepts: they created rules to specify what they do and don't want on their platform. Sorry if it came across as them deciding arbitrarily on the fly.
