Not completely true. Historically mass media was regulated. Lying also isn't legally protected if it causes injury (fire in a crowded theater being the canonical example, libel another).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

“Fire in a crowded theater” comes from the Supreme Court upholding the criminal conviction of a man handing out pamphlets protesting the WW1 draft. Not exactly the precedent I’d reach for if I was trying to argue that governmental regulation of speech is not dangerous.

Facebook Groups have been host to many organized acts of violence. The Kenosha shooting comes to mind as a recent example where the Group was reported to Facebook and made it through multiple layers of review before being allowed to persist. To say that such speech is protected under the First Amendment is too much of a stretch.

It hasn’t even been legally established that Kyle Rittenhouse did anything wrong. Legally, he is innocent until proven guilty, and he has a case for self-defense for every round he fired that night.

To say that the First Amendment doesn’t protect the rights of people to organize and assemble in a public place where one of them is later forced to defend themselves is absurd. People don’t use Facebook to plan premeditated acts of political violence. They use Signal.

Even if you were right that killing two people isn't "anything wrong", it's beside the point. This is about Facebook's role in the violence. The event was organized on Facebook.

Please point out where I argued that that was protected speech. I think you’ll find that you’ve made up my argument out of whole cloth, which is quite tiresome.

Facebook: willingly hosts groups that plan and enact violence.

You: It's a matter of free speech.

Me: Point out that people have been killed.

You: I didn't say it was free speech.

Like, what do you think people are mad at Facebook over if not all the people dying from the misinformation and violence coming from them?

The only thing I can say here that’s within the rules is this: this is completely unrelated to what I actually said. I’m not sure where this conversation you’re paraphrasing happened, but I wasn’t part of it.

The Supreme Court only upheld the fairness doctrine in situations where spectrum was limited (Red Lion Broadcasting vs FCC). Even at the time the fairness doctrine wasn't really applicable to mediums in which bandwidth/spectrum is not limited and not licensed to specific broadcasters.

It's not clear to me how this kind of regulation would be justified to the Supreme Court in regards to the Internet.

> fire in a crowded theater being the canonical example

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

well, the airwaves (which is where the FCC fairness doctrine was applied to) are a limited resource which, without regulation, become quickly polluted by bad actors.

print and cable are somewhat more immune to that particular issue.

> fire in a crowded theater being the canonical example

That phrase comes from Schenck v. United States, where the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could imprison an anti-war activist for disseminating pamphlets.

Breaking up Facebook would probably be the way to go; it has less troubling side effects than trying to regulate “hate speech” via a clever legal trick.

The leaker herself says breaking up FB won't solve anything and what's needed is far more resources internally

I’m strongly inclined to disagree. I generally find that the best way to prevent an organization from abusing its power is to deny it power.

If we split insta from FB, what incentives change that will cause a change in behavior?

It’s my external opinion that the real issue is the combination of the ad sales platform with the social media. If Instagram wasn’t owned by a company with an ad sales program, they would not have the capability to do what Facebook does today.

And this is exactly what they're doing. In effect they're loopholing the 1st amendment. Bring in Zuckerberg, hound him about removing specific "disinformation" under the threat of future political action if they don't comply. Then they get to throw the private company bs flag whenever someone says it's stomping on the 1st amendment.

> but they can certainly harass Facebook into doing it for them.

I believe you are exactly right here, or at least giving them cover to censor more with "the public's blessing."