> A company is not an organization of people who come together to exercise their free speech.
Except for news companies, entertainment companies, education companies, advertising companies, companies that place advertising, and companies whose interests need to be represented to elected officials and the public, sure.
And think of it from the other side. If the New York Times gets special free speech rights for journalistic reasons, who decides that they qualify as special? Does the government get to decide what counts as journalism? There's no mechanism for that either.
As to international concerns:
- Many of the things I mention (like deciding who gets especially free speech) are broad concerns, not ones specific to the U.S.
- Because of the principle of freedom of association, people from other countries are free to stay away from companies or countries, at least to the degree their governments allow that freedom.
It's fair to be concerned that corporations have negative impact at times. But large companies also use free speech to promote social, health, and environmental causes all the time. We don't complain about pink ribbon campaigns, global warming awareness initiatives, partnerships with nonprofits, sponsorships of publicly produced content, and other corporate speech like that.
Disagree. Those companies exercise their owner's or editors' free speech. The rest of the large organization are functionaries with severe limits on their speech, like at any other corporation.
I've yet to hear a fair mechanism for making those kinds of distinctions in objective courtrooms instead of in subjective editorial pages and message threads.
Every group has processes, rules, and norms for deciding how to produce and distribute content.
The New York Times is not an organization of people who came together to exercise their free speech rights. Its employees are there, primarily, to work. The product they sell is information/entertainment. This product does not change the goal which is to make money and does not change that it’s not an organization of people who came together to exercise their free speech rights.
It used to be the case that media had a special set of regulations regarding their ownership and how large they could be in terms of expansion. That is effectively no longer the case. The government, by the laws it enacted, has the authority to regulate media companies. Well, they used to. Society through it’s leaders gets to decide these things, for the most part. There are limits on what can legally be done by the government. Thanks to the Supreme Court that limit has been greatly expanded. The fact is that until recently few people held the belief that corporations should have the same free speech rights as humans.
Should Toyota, a foreign corporation with presence in the U.S., have the ability to influence American elections the way that a professional society of American doctors has? Allowing corporations to have the same free speech rights as humans is quite bad and will have long term bad consequences for the country.
Until Citizens United corporations didn’t have the same free speech rights as humans. This idea is a recent phenomenon. It’s unique, I believe, to the U.S. The U.S. is not the only “free” country in the world. This ought to suggest to you that perhaps something is strange with the notion of a corporation having the same free speech rights as a human.
I wish the protectors of corporate rights were as vigilant when it came to the rights of humans. But this isn’t the case in the U.S. so I’m in favor of companies not having speech limits in the U.S. for the same reason that I voted for Trump. The U.S. deserves the mess it is in. Let the road to serfdom be an easy one to navigate!
Except for news companies, entertainment companies, education companies, advertising companies, companies that place advertising, and companies whose interests need to be represented to elected officials and the public, sure.
And think of it from the other side. If the New York Times gets special free speech rights for journalistic reasons, who decides that they qualify as special? Does the government get to decide what counts as journalism? There's no mechanism for that either.
As to international concerns:
- Many of the things I mention (like deciding who gets especially free speech) are broad concerns, not ones specific to the U.S.
- Because of the principle of freedom of association, people from other countries are free to stay away from companies or countries, at least to the degree their governments allow that freedom.
It's fair to be concerned that corporations have negative impact at times. But large companies also use free speech to promote social, health, and environmental causes all the time. We don't complain about pink ribbon campaigns, global warming awareness initiatives, partnerships with nonprofits, sponsorships of publicly produced content, and other corporate speech like that.