It's a governmental restriction, not a company, employer, parent, or societal restriction.
Note the First Amendment prohibits Congress from passing a law restricting the free speech of the press. Social media companies are more like press than anything else - and the courts give them the same first amendments you have. They do not have to post your content if they don't like it, in the same manner you don't have to let them put yard signs on your property expressing things you dislike.
>Letting billionaires decide what is “misinformation” is not.
They're not stopping you from free speech. They're not letting you post anything you like on their property. You can speak all you want, you can organize, make flyers, start competing companies.
And billionaires are certainly not some monolithic group - for any one piece of information or misinformation there's plenty of billionaires on all sides of it.
The social media you refer to is abstractly the internet in general, and while your cause is considered toxic to business you may have a hard time finding a ready made platform with hundreds of billions of dollars invested in it for your spew, but you will always be able to find a way to host an endpoint and distribute your content. But no one is obligated to amplify it for you, especially not for profit enterprises who are creating a branded experience for their customers.
You don't. However those platforms have other users, and do not exist without money, which means either you pay a fee to use them or advertisers pay. Advertisers don't want to pay if idiots are going to post crap. They are businesses that don't exist with control over content. If one could work otherwise, then one would, but over and over groups that try implode and learn why there are nuances and tradeoffs. Watching Musk tank twitter is a perfect example of how he cannot come close to getting it right.
I don't understand how people think they have a right and expect others to foot the resulting bill for them.
>Freedom of political speech is not a law or constitutional amendment.
It absolutely is a law, with boundaries defined by law.
>Its a fundamental cultural value of Americans.
Precisely because we have had it as a law for a long time. Other cultures vary, with some more free to the point Americans would lose their mid with prudish abandon to much more restrictive. None are inherently, magically, absolutely right. There are tradeoffs, and cultures are the result of people living in one pattern for a long time.
Property rights in the US are also laws and cultural. Why right do you have to post stuff on others property? Little to none. The First Amendment is not the only right people have after all.
And you fail to address that the First Amendment also prohibits Congress from preventing press free speech, which laws have adjusted to include things that did not exist when the Founders added the Amendments.
>Im sick of people trying to kill it off in all but name by paradoxically citing the limitations of that amendment.
They're not. You have more ability to reach more people with more opinions than mankind has ever had. How many people before social media had the ability to get millions of followers?
You can post nearly anything on a website you make, which is easy to do. You can then gather followers and a platform. No one owes you that platform. The ability to reach others has never been so easy.
The censorship machine is large and high-volume.
https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/5ee020...
Of course, that is right now. When people find out it's a free for all, the trolls will descend. And on many networks like facebook, it's much easier to censor 1 neo nazi than 100 fake news victims so when we stop, that nazi will likely post more than the 100 others put together.
Many more people want to see nudity than want to read nazi rants.
Or (as is more likely) if those sites started restricting who could post things?
Actual freedom requires some restraint. Every "american" freedom recognises this from speech to religion to arms.
And that's without asking why a few billionaires who inherited major newspapers should be allowed to decide instead...