Bezos has no more free speech than Bernie Sanders, even though Sanders is only a millionaire.
Banning spending money on newspaper is banning the newspaper. Banning spending money on advertisement is banning the advertisement.
Under the dissenting view in Citizens United, Congress could ban the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc. from talking about politics. That's just absurd. Congress could have banned the Federalist Papers!
I've always tried to find a middle ground that prevented for profit corporations from spending money. But like 99% of our media is for profit corporations. It doesn't make sense to ban Amazon from political speech, unless they buy the Washington Post, in which case they can do whatever the fuck they want.
That's a deep, deep non sequitur.
Citzens United was about whether the government can stop corporations such as the NYT from talking about politics. The majority held that they cannot; freedom of the press (in the form of the fist amendment) protects them.
The minority held that the freedom of the press does not protect them. The person you are replying to noted, correctly, that under this view the NYT could be stopped from discussing politics, and your reply is, essentially, "that can't be right, the first amendment would protect them!" I agree, of course, as did, thankfully, Justice Kennedy and four of the other justices. The dissenting justices, however, seem to have forgotten about freedom of the press...
But I can think of dozens of ways to amplify and nurture non-corporate speech.
Yes, the torrent of bullshit is crippling democracy. But it's also true that other important speech is still not heard.
One of Justice Kennedy’s clerks in 2009-2010 was Misha Tseytlin, a Federalist Society member who undoubtedly helped write Kennedy’s opinion on the Bilski case, which widened the potential for business process patents and considered by many software developers to be a terrible decision regarding the patentability of software. Despite no connection to Wisconsin whatsoever, Tseytlin was later appointed Wisconsin Solicitor General by Scott Walker and worked on many of the voter suppression initiatives in Wisconsin. He’s been party to litigation on behalf of the Wisconsin Tavern League seeking to overturn Governor Evers’s executive order on masks and public gatherings. I’m a part-time resident of the state and grew up there, and it’s distressing to me that a fringe ideologue with no connection to the state continues to do it harm.