A recent Facebook audit comes from ongoing public pressure, not just from conservatives but from liberal civil rights groups and corporations. The conservatives tend to want more protection of free speech, and there is already a lot of evidence of Facebook or YouTube blocking content some committee determined dangerous (e.g., about C-19).
The liberals tend to want to block speech or advertising they consider hate speech or otherwise just unacceptable in terms of the latest politically correct or ideological pantheon of social crimes. It's actually the liberals putting on the most pressure right now. FB and YT have also blocked Christian content (even Prager U videos about the 10 Commandments).
How they get away with this so far is that they are deemed private enterprises and "publishers," meaning they get to determine what's on their sites. This is protected by their First Amendment rights.
But then again, they also bill themselves as "public forums" where all manner of ideas can be discussed, and if you add Google, which owns YT, FB that owns Instagram, and Twitter, which also censors tweets, you could say they're actually info monopolies. As public forums and as monopolies or nearly so on information communication, it would seem the First Amendment should apply.
So for now, Big Info Tech is clearly suppressing conservative content they don't like and not blocking enough content liberals deem censorable.
None of this is good for the First Amendment or free and pluralistic democracy.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2020
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