Thread by @willchamberlain

David French wrote a whole column whining about Justice Thomas' brilliant Big Tech opinion

But I want to focus in on this passage right here

Simply put - he's defined "free speech" so broadly that it would eviscerate civil rights law

If social media moderation decisions are free speech - EVEN in the face of laws like section 230 that explicitly say the platform is not the speaker - then any act of exclusion is free speech

Meaning that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is unconstitutional on free speech grounds

When French says that the companies are merely "creat[ing] communities that reflect their own private visions of what a marketplace of ideas should look like"

He should think about how that would apply to Jim Crow restauranteurs and hotel owners

On these massive platforms with essentially infinite user-created data, no one thinks the platform is speaking

That's the thrust of 230

What this is is a conflict between the right of Americans to speak on Twitter/Facebook vs. their right to free association

And we've already settled the question of whether corporate free association rights are absolute in this country

They aren't

You're exactly right, French would say that "race is a protected class"

But that's just a descriptive statement about current law

It doesn't do anything to undermine the normative weight of the argument that political affiliation *should* be protected

https://twitter.com/PunishedPablo/status/1380684238043803651?s=20