The issue is who gets to be the arbiter of what counts as "political propaganda and deliberate lies"?

The founding fathers thought that if government was given such power it would be abused to stifle speech that fell outside of those categories so the only way to protect speech was to protect it all.

I tend to think that if this is true for government, it's probably true for large corporations as well.

I think the issue is whether it still qualifies as free speech when it's paid advertisement. Inevitably the companies with the largest coffers and most to gain get a megaphone and you end up with tiers of free speech (pay to be heard).

And they are not banning political tweets...

We have rules against slander, defamation, libel, blackmail and leaking secrets, technically they are speech.

Yet we usually manage to distinguish them. I don't think this is an intractable problem.

> We have rules against slander, defamation, libel, blackmail and leaking secrets, technically they are speech.

slander/defamation/libel aren't criminal laws. It's civil law.

That's why the Covington Catholic School kid has to sue "trusted" liberal outlets which allegedly defamed him in a civil court for instant.

How did that turn out?

It's ongoing. He had been stopped on a technicality related to deadlines, but a new ruling by the court gets him past that.

That restriction on governments was made alongside the granting of many exclusive rights which corporations do not have.

Yes, the founding fathers were trying to protect freedom of religion, which is exactly what you just described. Do you have a problem with that?

Yes.

Yeah, among other things, they were.

What do you think of a world where Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan get to decide what is and isn’t “political propaganda and deliberate lies”? Because until very recently, they were “the government.”