IANAL, but common misconception is that a constitution regulates the rights between individuals/citizens of that state. But this is wrong, the constitution regulates the rights of an individual against the state/government. That is, you have the freedom of speech against any government entities and cannot be prosecuted for exercising it. But if you come to my bar/house whatever and I don't like your opinion, I can show you the door and you can't quote the constitution and refuse to leave because you are exercising your rights.

Civil Liberties don't exist if you leave them to the public sector. The US Government hosts and produces virtually nothing on it's own and just about everything you interact with is run or produced by a corporation.

If you leave the responsibility of Free Speech to the Free Market then you end up having freedom of press only for the people who own one.

You can own a corporation with about $400 and an hour of filling out a form online, plus a month or so waiting for various government agencies to process it.

The hard part is getting that corp to own anything of value, since it starts with just the money you put in. But this is still a viable path to wealth for people with time horizons measured in years rather than days. (And all the people who want immediate gratification provides a fairly large market to trade with.)

> you end up having freedom of press only for the people who own one.

That's how things have traditionally been in the US, is it not? As far as I know there was never any law that would force me to allow someone else to use my (literal) printing press.

The exception is the FCC fairness doctrine, but the basis for that was that the "printing press" (RF allocations) is actually a common good, and was only granted to private interests in exchange for certain concessions.

It's how it is today and also how it was when the framers wrote the constitution. Benjamin Rush suggested a particular printer for Thomas Paine to work with to print Common Sense, because Rush knew not every printer would want to print it based on its content.

This isn't the case. The rights we have are naturally ours, by nature of our very existence, and the constitution enumerates them as a mechanism to keep the government from infringing on them. It is very clearly written this way, and to say that our foundational natural rights don't matter in any context is dystopian and authoritarian. That is to say, rights exist outside and beyond the constitution. The question is really one of e.g. my rights vs Facebook's rights.

The moment the government started giving our licenses as to who can run a bar, meaning that not just anyone can open one and bars have to be pleasing enough to the state to be allowed is the moment when the separation between private business and state ceases to be a clear well agreed upon line.

Comparing your bar/house to a massive social platform like Reddit is absurd beyond belief.

This sucks when there are only three or four bars and they all have the same corporate interest.

Look at Visa going after porn and private sex work.

This entire culture of trying to control what others can say via deplatformization is neoliberal fascism.

Bad things get said. But free speech protects all of us from tyranny, and we have to defend it. Because they'll come after you and your ideas next.

Americans have thick skin, or at least most of us do. It's a consequence of our liberty, and it's a defining trait of our system.

Pump and dump schemes being regulated being framed as a free speech issue? I don't know if it is productive to make this about free speech. The purpose of life isn't just to emit speech, and indeed the purpose of WSB is for people to exhort other people to action and that action is to buy and sell certain stocks, so that a subset of participants can profit and other people lose their capital. "Speech" is not the central issue or the most interesting one to me about this case, it is rather more interesting to see how mobs can be formed and influenced to take action.

The law isn't set up to regulate 'distributed' peer to peer pump and dumps. The precedent is all focused on clearly identifiable orchestrators.

E.g: I run a stock newsletter. I hire a boxer, Evander Tyson, to hype a biotech penny stock, Scampill Co.. Tyson says to his followers and to my newsletter subscribers that Scampill is about to get a drug approved by the FDA that will cure cancer. I and my friends at Scampill make sure that the patsies have enough stock to buy when I put out my first email blast. When the stock goes up 900% we sell our shares. At that point there are no more large lots on the market, the spreads widen, and the price collapse occurs.

The SEC then sends their feds after me, the boxer I hired, and my friends, the insiders at Scampill. If they can catch me, I do some time in club Fed and have to pay some fines.

In this instance, there is no insider collusion, there is no single promoter with an interest, and there is no commonality to build a class among the redditors etc. who participated in the manipulation. You have a mixture of people who may have said illegal things and people who had totally licit (in the eyes of the law) motivations and actions. You have a big mixture there of mens rae and its absence and a big mixture of types of actus reus and the lack thereof. It is a big mess as compared to making a case against the typical P&D mob scheme.

Yet, you have an outcome that is somewhat similar to a classic P&D, and on a regulated marketplace, whereas most P&Ds happen on less regulated over the counter markets.

I just think it's really hypocritical of the government to advocate for freedom when they're literally making the market less free. The only markets to be regulated should be the ones that would otherwise be in market failure, like medicine.