> It should be impossible to remove someone from banking, PayPal, Shopify, social media, etc.

As a freelancer I can choose my clients. I would hate to live in a world where a bad client could force me to continue to work with them unless they broke the law.

[Citation Needed].

Straight up, a singular company having control over something was well established at the time of the First Amendment.

1. "Monopoly" is a greek word which was used to describe a company that had a monopoly in Greece. This long pre-dates the first amendment.

2. Kings routinely gave out exclusivity of a product to a company, this is the whole backstory on the Tea Act [1].

3. Being denied access to something isn't a new concept. They could've written the first 10 amendments to address private citizens and choose not to. It's not like private citizens didn't try to surpress speech.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act

Times are not new. Technology is new. Every problem is old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

The few hundred corporations that existed by 1800 were chartered by individual states, couldn't do business outside that state, weren't allowed to participate in the political process, and couldn't buy stock in other corporations.

During and after the civil war is when "modern" corporations started to show. They made huge profits from procurement contracts and took advantage of the disorder and corruption of the times to buy legislatures, judges and even presidents. They lobbied and bribed their way to more relaxed laws that allowed them to accrue even more money and political power, leading to the first Gilded Age.

Then in 1886, the Supreme Court decided that Corporations are People, too[1], and it went downhill from there (except for a brief blip in the 1930s).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern....

Utilities lend themselves to monopoly well.

The economy of scale allows one company to efficiently become the only source of that utility for an region.

Meanwhile, the customers of the utility are subject to the dark side of monopoly. Unjustified rate increases or cutting off service for any reason whatsoever.

It makes no sense.

This setup only works well for Power companies, airlines, water, waste, etc. when there are robust regulation around them.

Could you imagine if the power company could cut you off because of your political leanings? or the water company?

It is no different for monopolies on the internet.

Everything they do is heavily regulated. They cannot do things like cut off service for any reason whatsoever, or raise rates without justification.

The problem is that, due to lack of anti-trust enforcement, we have quasi-utility companies that run commerce. If they have the market position of a utility, they need to be regulated as such.

Certain large internet companies might eventually be considered utilities or common carriers, but I think that this would be a bad thing because it would tend to favor monopolization.

At any rate, no one has or should have a state-enforced right to an account on a particular social media site. It’s silly how fast people jump to comparing Facebook to the electric company.

The article mentions disabled company accounts. I'm sure they froze some funds too, which Harr will probably never get back. This is the problem. Capital has all the power & we have no (legal) recourse.

Imagine you get to decide to stop working for a bad client, on whatever terms you want, without warning, and you still keep payment.

ETA: It looks like the shopify account was restored.

Besides, how does the first amendment enshrine that?

  > how does the first amendment enshrine [the right of association]

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1-8-1/ALD...

That's a very bad idea. Because then you have to create a myriad of laws that forbids discrimination on ever growing number of things. It turns ensuring everybody's basic economic freedom into a game of lagging whack-a-mole.

If a business advertises a product or a service to the public with a price they shouldn't be allowed to refuse the product or a service to anybody willing to pay the price.

But it is now pretty much settled law that people cannot weaponize their freedom of association to discriminate on these grounds. If you offer a service, you have to provide the service to the classes of people that you could be reasonably expected to serve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group#United_States

You can have a "no brunettes" or "no people named Chris" rule and be entirely fine.

how can the customer have a right to choose when there is only one option due to [de-facto] monopoly? Or say there are only 2 options and each has deplatformed the customer/user. How the right to choose would work for that customer/user?

Monopoly's right to choose their customers destroys the last remnants of the customers' right to choose (which gets already severly damaged when the monopoly forms).

That's fine when we're talking about mom-and-pop baptist bakers that don't want to bake your gay wedding cake, or little mastodon instances that don't want Nazis coming in. (An example from both the social left and social right to choose whom they associate with - but that's not what we're debating.)

But when you're dealing with 100M MAUs or daily transaction volumes in the billions, you're no longer a person - you're infrastructure. A public square. And moreover these giant companies are few and they all move in lockstep with one another, which means you have no avenue to turn to when you get removed.

Make all the cakes you want for a limited clientele out of your house.

<s> Of course, I'd like to only rent hotel rooms to the sort of people that I'd like to have as my clients & guests. However, this has been illegal for me to do since 1965. </s>

I’m free to refuse to do business with a company for racial reasons but a company is not feee to refuse to do business with me due to my race.

Also, the whole idea that companies are 'people' and therefore are protected under these constitutional rights is a bullshit concept. It was never the intent of the founders, it was act of corruption of the legal system.

I think we sped past that mile marker a long time ago.

We have been warning that speech moderation and rules about "distasteful speech" and the like would end up hurting those who were advocating for it but I guess it requires a generational learning event.

I guess until it gets bad enough that we decide that ideas regarding free speech and censorship should apply to corporations we are left with what Mr. Munroe had to say: https://xkcd.com/1357/

So yes, our reliance on platforms which can cut us off is a problem, the chilling effect on online speech is a problem. But not over this.

It's not as clear-cut as you make it sound, and that's why the Brandenburg test is such an important concept: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/brandenburg_test

> The test determined that the government may prohibit speech advocating the use of force or crime if the speech satisfies both elements of the two-part test:

> The speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” AND The speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”

Imminent is the keyword there. Saying "let's go kill that CEO" at the head of a mob outside their home isn't protected, as it passes the test - it is genuinely likely to result in the mob storming the house, as the mob is positioned to be able to do so as an immediate reaction to the speech telling them to, and the speaker knows it.

In contrast, consider some of the speech found to be protected by this standard:

> a KKK leader gave a speech at a rally to his fellow Klansmen, and after listing a number of derogatory racial slurs, he then said that “it's possible that there might have to be some vengeance [sic] taken.”

> In NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co . (1982), Charles Evers threatened violence against those who refused to boycott white businesses. The Supreme Court applied the Brandenburg test and found that the speech was protected : “Strong and effective extemporaneous rhetoric cannot be nicely channeled in purely dulcet phrases. An advocate must be free to stimulate his audience with spontaneous and emotional appeals for unity and action in a common cause. When such appeals do not incite lawless action, they must be regarded as protected speech.”

Advocating violence in the abstract doesn't satisfy the imminence requirement. Unless there's a direct connection in time and place between the speaker and the lawless actor, it's protected.

A separate, but related issue is people assuming "free speech" and the First Amendment are equal; that you have "free speech" as long as you have a First Amendment, and only that. But obviously, a society where you can be totally ostracized from all markets and common society on the basis of your speech is not a free society, even if the government doesn't put you in jail. To live in a free society and to have free speech doesn't mean only the government tolerates speech, it extends to us.

Adding in what Idlewords posted below:

"The guy also posted "the CEO must die" to his Instagram."

Provisioning a hit-list in the context of a call to murder the people described isn't abstract or vague either. At best it's a terroristic threat.

And actually, regarding the Brandenburg case itself, this is what was said:

> We're not a revengent organization, but if our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race, it's possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken.

So, actually, the speech was specifically directed against a named group of individuals - "our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court" - but is still protected because of the lack of imminence. I'll note that there is a distinction between "the President should be killed" and "I will kill the President" - the latter is a true threat, the former is not.

As the ruling says: "the mere abstract teaching . . . of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action."

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

The strongest good faith interpretation of "the CEO must die" is that it is not a call to action for murdering "the CEO". But we'll let the author clarify:

>“The CEO is more than an individual it is a figurehead of the capitalist order,” he wrote. “When we say the ceo must die, we mean the structure of capitalism must be broken.”

Good faith is for arguments, not calls to murder.

And now we wait.

Generalized calls to violence are perfectly legal and have been a part of American political culture for centuries. Sometimes it's much hotter than others (the 1960s were pretty hot), but so it goes. I personally wouldn't do it, and I don't agree with these statements or these cards, but people have a right to say it.

Unless you really think it's just a deck of cards with a particularly bizarre motif, and I don't think any of us really buy that.

To quote IdleWorlds above (once again, thank you for this info): "The guy also posted "the CEO must die" to his Instagram."

There's no "what if" here.

The banking pieces probably fall afoul of AML/CTF rules, which is fine. But the social media bans, total wipe of accounts, no process in place for restitution, and no communication are literally mechanisms of de-personing.

I think we have very different perspectives on what it means to be human, how much all of this (waves around hand in the general direction of social media) is worth, and what is important.

I value tiktok, and all other social media platforms, at nothing. $0.00, maximum. If you built your business on them, you fucked up. If you use them for news, you fucked up. And if you feel that they are needed or important, you DEFINITELY fucked up.

Want to know of road closures? Better check the relevant DoTs Twitter pages.

For critical services it may even be illegal, since you can’t access Twitter pages without logging into Twitter, and you can’t signup to Twitter without passing a CAPTCHA and other user-hostile gating mechanisms.

  > literally mechanisms of de-personing