Speech

Topic: First Amendment

TechFreedom is deeply committed to the principled defense of First Amendment rights, regardless of whether we agree with any particular exercise of those rights, because the degradation of First Amendment rights for some threatens the rights of all.

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Opinion Piece

California’s Social Media Bill Flies In The Face Of The First Amendment

California has officially joined the growing list of states attempting to regulate how social media companies run their platforms. The state’s proposed legislation, however, faces a major legal obstacle: the Constitution. California lawmakers are marching ahead with AB 2408, the Social Media ...

Andy Jung
July 19, 2022
Opinion Piece

The Quest for a Better Online “Community”

Remember Justine Sacco? In December 2013, while sitting in Heathrow Airport, she tweeted: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” She had 170 Twitter followers. No one reacted to her crude crack at her own entitlement. She boarded her flight. Eleven hours later, she landed in Cape Town ...

Corbin K. Barthold
May 16, 2022
Opinion Piece

Musk’s Free Speech Crusade

For Elon Musk, coming up with $44 billion was the easy part. What comes next, less so. To the delight of many conservatives, Musk has purchased Twitter ...

Corbin K. Barthold
April 26, 2022
Opinion Piece

Musk Makes the Mask Slip

Though he has just offered to buy Twitter for around $40 billion, it’s far from clear that Elon Musk knows how to run a social media platform. Speaking about his bid at an event last week, Musk mused that people should be “able to speak freely within ...

Corbin K. Barthold
April 17, 2022

Latest Articles

Opinion Piece

Two Dogmas Of The Free Speech Panic

Antonio García Martínez recently invited me on his podcast, The Pull Request. I was thrilled. Antonio is witty, charming, and intimidatingly brilliant (he was a PhD student in physics at Berkeley, and it shows). We did the episode, and we had a great time. But we never got to an important topic—Antonio’s take on free speech and the Internet. In April, Antonio released a piece on his Substack, Freeze peach and the Internet, in which he asserts the existence of a “‘content moderation’ ...

Corbin K. Barthold
July 21, 2022
Opinion Piece

California’s Social Media Bill Flies In The Face Of The First Amendment

California has officially joined the growing list of states attempting to regulate how social media companies run their platforms. The state’s proposed legislation, however, faces a major legal obstacle: the Constitution. California lawmakers are marching ahead with AB 2408, the Social Media Platform Duty to Children Act. On June 28, the Judiciary Committee unanimously passed an amended version of the bill, tweaking several provisions. Next, AB 2408 must pass the ...

Andy Jung
July 19, 2022
Opinion Piece

Florida and Texas’ ‘Free Speech’ Social Media Laws Would Require Sites to Host Mass Shooting Videos

Texas has joined Florida among states with the largest school shootings in American history. Both states are governed by conservatives who insist that the Second Amendment is sacrosanct. But if either state took the First Amendment half as seriously, they wouldn't be attacking the constitutional rights of social media sites to remove content that helps cause mass shootings. The more people can watch the live streams of such shootings, the more children will ...

Berin Szóka
May 26, 2022
Opinion Piece

The Quest for a Better Online “Community”

Remember Justine Sacco? In December 2013, while sitting in Heathrow Airport, she tweeted: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” She had 170 Twitter followers. No one reacted to her crude crack at her own entitlement. She boarded her flight. Eleven hours later, she landed in Cape Town and turned on her phone. The first thing she saw was a text message from an old friend: “I’m so sorry to see what’s happening.” While Sacco had been airborne, her tweet ...

Corbin K. Barthold
May 16, 2022
Opinion Piece

Musk, Twitter, Bluesky & The Future Of Content Moderation (Part II)

What Objectives Should Guide Content Moderation? Even existing alternative social media networks claim to offer the kind of neutrality that Musk contemplates—but have failed to deliver. In June 2020, John Matze, Parler’s founder and then its CEO, proudly declared the site to be an “a community town square, an open town square, with no censorship,” adding, “if you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler.” Yet that same day, Matze also bragged of ...

Berin Szóka and Ari Cohn
May 4, 2022
Opinion Piece

Musk, Twitter, Why The First Amendment Can’t Resolve Content Moderation (Part I)

Musk wants Twitter to stop making contentious decisions about speech. “[G]oing beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people,” he declares. Just following the First Amendment, he imagines, is what the people want. Is it, though? The First Amendment is far, far more absolutist than Musk realizes.  Remember Neo-Nazis with burning torches and screaming “the Jews will not replace us!”? The First Amendment required Charlottesville to allow that demonstration. Some ...

Berin Szóka and Ari Cohn
May 4, 2022
Opinion Piece

Musk’s Free Speech Crusade

For Elon Musk, coming up with $44 billion was the easy part. What comes next, less so. To the delight of many conservatives, Musk has purchased Twitter and announced that he will make the platform “an arena for free speech.” One can almost picture him storming into Twitter HQ, marching downstairs, and kicking in the rusty door to the content-moderation boiler room. Steam blows and bells ring as, with a mighty tug, he dislodges a giant iron lever from the “Less Speech” setting and wrenches ...

Corbin K. Barthold
April 26, 2022
Opinion Piece

Musk Makes the Mask Slip

Though he has just offered to buy Twitter for around $40 billion, it’s far from clear that Elon Musk knows how to run a social media platform. Speaking about his bid at an event last week, Musk mused that people should be “able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.” But a social media product that came to be dominated by anti-Semitism, porn, coordinated abuse, virulent racial animus, and bot-generated foreign propaganda—all forms of speech “within the bounds of the law”—would ...

Corbin K. Barthold
April 17, 2022