Thread by @rch371

1/7 Social Media 'Censorship': Reactionaries are now ironically exercised by (social) media oligopoly. Progressives, meanwhile, ironically crow that silencing by these oligopolies isn't 'state action' for 1A purposes. This irony is rooted in our long ago having lost sight of ...

2/7 ... that form of deliberative democracy that our Constitution constitutes and vouchsafes. Here, I believe, is how best to think about what we must do:

Our Constitution constitutes a republic, or 'res publica.' ‘Res Publica’ means ‘public thing.’ A republic presupposes ...

3/7 ... both a public sector and a public space, meaning in turn that we have to preserve public *media* space and public media *oversight* in the name of that public *deliberation* which is the neural process of any republic. In the 18th century, ‘media’ meant pamphlets and ...

4/7 ... newspapers. In the 21st century, it also means cable, spectrum, and broadband. Public cable, spectrum, and broadband must be publicly maintained and overseen.

Now the 1A constrains *how* these are overseen. It prohibits content-discrimination within the bounds of ...

5/7 ... fundamental-rights-respecting deliberative democracy, which again is precisely what our Constitution constituted in constituting a republic. Bigoted ‘expression’ like white supremacists' does not respect fundamental rights, calls to ignore electoral rights and results ...

6/7 ... are not democratic, and incitement to political violence is not deliberative.

The relevant conclusion for present purposes is clear: Reactionaries now and progressives in normal times are quite right that oligopoly media platforms should be de jure or de facto public...

7/7 ... At the same time, public authorities will be entirely right to keep white supremacist and violence-inciting rhetoric off of public platforms. Not only does the 1A not protect this anti-Constitutional filth, it effectively mandates its public proscription.

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