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The First Amendment Is Out of Control
[NY Times] By Tim WuThe First Amendment was written in the 18th century with the noble and vitally important goal of ensuring robust political debate and a free press. For much of American history, First Amendment cases involving speech typically concerned political dissenters, religious outcasts, intrepid journalists and others whose ability to express their views was threatened by a powerful and sometimes overbearing state. The First Amendment was a tool that helped the underdog. But sometime in this century the judiciary lost the plot. Judges have transmuted a constitutional provision meant to protect unpopular opinion into an all-purpose tool of legislative nullification that now mostly protects corporate interests. Nearly any law that has to do with the movement of information can be attacked in the name of the First Amendment. Monday’s Supreme Court decision in the two NetChoice cases greatly adds to the problem. The cases concern two state laws, one in Florida and one in Texas, that limit the ability of social media platforms to remove or moderate content. (Both laws were enacted in response to the perceived censorship of political conservatives.) While the Supreme Court remanded both cases to lower courts for further factual development, the court nonetheless went out of its way to state that the millions of algorithmic decisions made every day by social media platforms are protected by the First Amendment. It did so by blithely assuming that those algorithmic decisions are equivalent to the expressive decisions made by human editors at newspapers. Mr. Wu is a law professor at Columbia who writes often about Big Tech. He served on the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy from 2021 to 2023. There's more at the link Posted by: badanov 2024-07-03 |
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