Obummer

“The First Amendment,” Obama deigned to explain, “is a check on the power of the state. It doesn’t apply to private companies like Facebook and Twitter.” Obama has not been known up to now as a strict constructionist regarding the Constitution, which he has been only too happy to regard as an eternally malleable “living document” when it served the Leftist agenda to do so, but strictly speaking, he is right. The First Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” But Facebook and Twitter (and YouTube and Instagram and all the rest) can restrict speech all they want because they are not government entities subject to regulation by Congress.

In saying this, however, Obama ignores several crucial facts. One is that while the First Amendment does indeed prohibit only the government from restricting speech, the freedom of expression is a revered principle in the United States, and the social media giants exercise an outsized power over that freedom today, for they control all the principal means of communication that people use nowadays to exercise that freedom.

Imagine if a hundred years ago, in 1922, three or four like-minded and powerful conglomerates bought up all the newspapers in the country and systematically began excluding points of view with which they disagreed. No one would have had any problem seeing a serious threat to the freedom of speech in this, and few, if any, would have shrugged it off by saying that these were private companies, so there was nothing anyone could do. The federal government for well over a hundred years has pursued antitrust action against huge companies that had foreclosed upon any competition; if any corporations warrant such action against them today, it’s the social media giants.

There is more. Read the rest here.