SUPPLEMENTAL LEGAL INFORMATION Re: Marsh v. Alabama
Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946), was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court, in which it ruled that a state trespassing statute could not be used to prevent the distribution of religious materials on a town's sidewalk, even though the sidewalk was part of a privately owned company town. The Court based its ruling on the provisions of the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment.
While the Marsh holding at first appears somewhat narrow and inapplicable to the present day due to the disappearance of company towns from the United States, it was raised in the somewhat high-profile 1996 cyberlaw case, Cyber Promotions v. America Online, 948 F. Supp. 436, 442 (E.D. Pa. 1996). Cyber Promotions wished to send out "mass email advertisements" to AOL customers. AOL installed software to block those emails. Cyber Promotions sued on free speech grounds and cited the Marsh case as authority for the proposition that even though AOL's servers were private property, AOL had opened them to the public to a degree sufficient that constitutional free speech protections could be applied.
The federal district court disagreed, thereby paving the way for spam filters at the Internet service provider level.
In Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, the Supreme Court distinguished a private shopping mall from the company town in Marsh and held that the mall had not been sufficiently dedicated to public use for First Amendment free speech rights to apply within it.
QUESTION: Were Jones' and Infowars' free speech rights violated by Facebook and other online sites by denying them access?
ANSWER: No. Facebook and other social media platforms are private companies and have terms of service that users or consumers agree to in order to participate.
NESTA1 PERSPECTIVE: i don't think that Facebook or other social media platforms should deny access to Alex Jones or others unless they are using those platforms to promote violence or other illegal activities. Notwithstanding my opinion, the current interpretation of the law seems to come down on the side of a private company's right to stipulate the terms of use for its social media product. If they're going to censor, however, i would like to see Facebook and other social media platforms be consistent and deny access to the CIA, Pentagon, etc. to prevent them from using social media as weapons to saturate with fake messages in order to incite the violent overthrow of foreign governments (e.g., this was part of the standard MO to foment Arab Spring violence).
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