For example, Knight vs Trump basically held that Twitter was enough of a public forum that the president could not block people on his twitter account (here's a counter argument to that decision: https://abovethelaw.com/2019/07/twitter-is-not-a-public-foru...).
I'd be curious to know why Prager U didn't try to argue that youtube is a public forum. Youtube is by default open to the public to post speech on, and it holds a near monopoly position on its particular product, much like twitter. The hitch in this plan is that from my understanding, Knight didn't argue that all of twitter was a public forum, they just argued that Trump's account was a public forum.
Despite that, it seems a little contradictory to me to have legal system where twitter is considered a quasi public forum, and youtube it not.
The reasoning is that it’s similar to a government official holding a meeting, or other such public forum. That has to be open to all comers without viewpoint discrimination.
But it doesn’t mean a private business can’t block people from their accounts - just that it’s illegal for a government official to use that feature.
Except this isn't true. There are a number of exceptions where a public official can hold a meeting that is open to the public but only allows very specific topics to be discussed as chosen by the public official. In some cases, only the official may speak which means it isn't a public forum at all. Public officials in public meetings even have the power to exclude people based a a variety of criteria such as the case where someone is disrupting the meeting, or a press briefing. Knight vs Trump ruled that none of those exceptions could apply to Trump on Twitter, in essence making Trump's twitter account a completely public forum whether he wanted to or not.
In the case of Marsh vs Alabama, both parties involved were private. My point in bringing up Knight vs Trump was to point out that the issue of social platforms as public forums has already been decided in very narrow cases. It seems like Prager U's best legal strategy would be to argue for the expansion of the public forum designation to apply to youtube. A number of people in this very thread have expressed sympathy to that approach so it's not out of left field. Without youtube being declared a public forum, Prager U's first amendment approach is dead on arrival as the court rightly pointed out in this case.
Yes, but even with that ruling Twitter is still free to ban people from its platform and even prevent them from viewing Trump's tweets by blacklisting spammer and scraper IPs from it's platform, or even restrict and delete Trump's account. The court declaring Trump's twitter account a public forum does not change any of that. No can sue Twitter over that for not being able to view Trump's tweets. So this is not relevant at all.
Even the public square analogy doesn't really work because we never had global public squares.
Probably "originalists", although they may also be orientalists too :)
These platforms are the giant retail shops that line the square in a capitalist world. They come and go. You don’t have to go into them and they can kick you out whenever they want.
There's at least some merit in an argument that YouTube is so dominant in user-uploaded video that, absent a big budget and/or notability to drive viewers elsewhere, if your video is not on YouTube it might as well not exist as far as the broader world is concerned.
You spend too much time in tech and you get blinders and literally start to think that nothing else exists. Most people still get their information from television and, believe it or not, radio.
YouTube just makes video hosting easy. You have a freedom of speech, not a freedom to a guaranteed audience.
Have you ever actually seen someone in a public square going on a rant? They are often lucky if they reach a few people.
As far as I'm aware, I can't upload videos to CNN. I'm certainly aware that other sources of video exist; I don't even use YouTube much myself.
I'm actually sympathetic to your overall argument especially when complaints focus on the difficulty of monetizing video outside of YouTube. But it's at least worth discussing what it means when a private company has outsized control over certain types of information sharing.
When YouTube started you could at least make the argument that uploading video was difficult, because in order for people to watch you had to convert it to VP6 and play it within Flash, but today everything supports MPEG4.
Monetizing video outside of YouTube also isn’t difficult. Sponsors are easy to get if you have high quality content. If you have trash content then yeah, it is hard to monetize. Which lets be real here—that’s what we are talking about.
People think they have a right to a free audience and a (cost free) revenue stream for uploading garbage content that is just marginally better than literally nothing at all. People seem to believe they have a right to an income for creating what is really just spam in video form. Honestly, I wish YouTube would just terminate the revenue sharing option entirely for non-partners. Let someone else deal with the garbage content and its associated drama.
Lets see who funds PragerU. From the Wiki:
>Much of the early funding for PragerU came from hydraulic fracturing billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks.[2][4] Two members of the Wilks family are on PragerU's board.[2] The next-largest donor is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.[7][23] Other donors include the Morgan Family Foundation, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, Donors Trust, and the Minnesota-based Sid and Carol Verdoorn Foundation, led by former C.H. Robinson CEO Sid Verdoorn.[23]
>As of 2018, the organization reportedly had a $10 million annual budget, of which it spent more than 40% on marketing.[2] In 2019, PragerU raised $22 million and expects to receive $25 million in 2020.[4][24] PragerU consistently spends more on Facebook advertising than major political campaigns and national advocacy groups.[25] It ranks among the 10 biggest political spenders on the platform.[25]
The lawsuit also talks about being demonetized because of advertiser preferences.
You can literally start with uploading .mp4 files on your site immediately. How many tens of billions have been spent on campaigns? There's so much money sloshing about just in the immediate vicinity of the political agenda driven folks complaining but somehow no one can throw source code on GitHub of Reddit and clones onto a server and buy a domain for a few bucks, or set up a video sharing site with all the commercial tools available, and advertise them.
I’ve used AWS and Cloudfront for years, never had a problem. And that’s only for high traffic applications.
EDIT I just looked this up. Seems like, in this specific instance, Cloudflare is contractually bound by the following:
"The party operating the resolver should not by default block or filter domains unless specifically required by law in the jurisdiction in which the resolver operates. Mozilla will generally seek to work with DNS resolvers that provide unfiltered DNS responses and, at its discretion, may remove from consideration resolvers subject to legal filtering obligations, depending on the scope and nature of those obligations."
The freedom of speech prohibits government control of speech in government (read: public) spaces, in order to conserve public right of criticism of the government.
These massive platforms, as a matter of business, attempt to replace and own “the public square.” Google/YouTube, directly or indirectly, controls an enormous fraction of the public conversation. Their interests, as corporations constantly lobbying for favorable regulatory treatment, tend to align along the “appease the government as long as it doesn’t hurt our revenue” axis.
You can with some validity argue that an entity that monopolizes control of the public square is obligated to protect the rights intrinsic in that square, all the more so when their interests align with the government’s.
You can, with some validity, argue that a company doesn’t have to have a monopoly on the public square to be forced to recognize those rights, but as a continuous function, as they subsume more of the public square they should undergo increasing burden for conserving the functions of that square.
It used to be “the public square” was a distinct geographic entity. We are now faced with the fact that it was, maybe, a set of functions attached to that geographic entity, and it’s those functions that must be protected.