A corporation is made up of people. You cannot take away their free speech without infringing in the free speech of individuals. I have never even visited the US, and I still support free speech. It's not a uniquely American concept.
>Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequence.
Speech with consequences isn't free speech, by definition.
>Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.
Alarmingly, a lot of online dictionaries - at least in English - seem to define the 2,400 year old concept of free speech as the American First amendment. Can anyone who speaks another language see if this misconception has spread to other languages?
By that definition, freedom of speech was always a fiction even in the US — and not just because broadening retaliation enough to say consequences "are" a retaliation is casting a net so wide that it denies causality.
I wonder how many people got away with sincerely saying "Hail Satan, that Jesus bloke was an idiot" in the late 17th (or even 19th) century Bible Belt?
By your choice, yes. That’s not the government restricting your speech.
Imagine a group that gets together to form a company where they all mutually pledge that “anything goes”. What rights to free speech does that resulting company have? What rights to speech does the New York Times company have?
You don't give up any rights. Your company (which is a creature of statute) gets whatever rights the law gives it. Which given its privileged position (perpetual succession, limited liability etc.) are inevitably going to be different from those of actual people.
Which is fine. If you want to exercise your right to free speech you can. You can't necessarily make a company exercise those rights on your behalf because the company (in a fairly profound legal sense) isn't you and has limits by law.
We're not talking about how things legally are in US (especially considering that this isn't even a story about US!), but about what the proper handling of free speech vis a vis corporations should be.
And it's hard to not come to a conclusion that corporations, being legal creations of the state distinct from a mere assembly of individuals, cannot have any natural rights, since their very existence is a privilege; the society can attach whatever restrictions it wants to corporate charters, so long as they're uniform.
(Note that there's a separate question of what restrictions are actually a good idea. I would actually argue for the free speech side here, but that's beyond the point; the point is that, for corporations, either way, we're talking about granted privileges, not inherent rights.)
Separately, "Congress shall make no law", interpreted most literally, means that e.g. state legislatures can make such laws. The First Amendment was not incorporated against the states until 1925, so this country has only had federal free speech protections for less than a century.
Freedom of speech is the freedom from violent consequence. When the government enforces a law, it does that by using or threatening individuals with violence. It cannot use violence against a corporation without using violence against an individual, for the same reason you cannot burn down a forest without burning down a tree.
Regardless, it's not like you can avoid these laws by not incorporating. An individual who runs a site with user-generated content in a way the government doesn't like would be in even more trouble.
It can "use violence" against a corporation without using it against the individual.
That's exactly WHY corporations have limited liability for the individuals in many cases. That's partly WHY corporations exist.
Do your homework before making ideological mistakes that smarter people have thought of hundreds of years ago.
Your comments sound like the type of nonsense that people use to enforce their views on others; which freedom of speech doesn't grant you, though you wish it would.
No, it's not possible to use violence against a corporation. It doesn't have a body, it can't feel pain, fear, etc. Ultimately, the violence needs to be directed at an individual. The government may (or may not) have declared that the corporation is dissolved before then, but that itself doesn't change anything because the corporation is just an abstraction. The action the government want to stop or compel can only be done by individuals.
It's ironic that you accuse me of wanting to enforce my views on others when that's precisely what you are arguing for, and I'm arguing against.
That's still ultimately targeted at the individuals who control and benefit from those assets. If a married couple own a car together, you can threaten to damage their car to influence their actions. The same is true if those two people own a business together and that business owns the car, and it's still true if instead of 2 people, it's 2000 people. The distinction of it being a corporation doesn't make any practical difference. You would still be trying to influence the actions of individuals in the same way as if the corporation did not exist, and it would still be individuals who are adversely affected.
By that definition, the couple is "doing violence" against me by operating the car, as it damages the environment, which is an asset that I control via democratic means (compare and contrast one-person-one-vote of a democracy to one-share-one-vote of traded companies) and benefit from by living in.
And likewise, you're being so reductive that the same logic also makes the state and the law "just people", as the courts are made of judges and lawyers who are people, likewise the police and the bailiffs are people, the banks may be increasingly automated but they're also still people, and so on.
But then, we have the government by consent, at least to the same degree we have employment by consent; not just by elections, but also e.g. "if you don't like Brexit, move to Germany" as someone said to me, oblivious that I already had — but not everyone has that option in practice even if they do on paper, just as not everyone is in charge of their employment opportunities in practice even if they are on paper.
You're on to something—this is one of the reasons why trying to color things as ethically-fine or ethically-bad purely based on whether you can find a way to associate them with violence is a dead end. It's violence all the way down when you start looking. Now, it actually can be helpful to analyze things in those terms, but not if it ends at "I found a way that it's violence, so now it's ethically bad, period, end of story". It's as if nuance and context are vital for actually making sense of things. Literally covered in Book I of Plato's Republic, but no shortage of people online using that (very selectively, always, because, as noted, it goes off the rails immediately if you apply it consistently) as the core guiding principle of their political philosophy, such as it is.
Of course the state is also just people. All organizations are comprised of individuals. The law is not an organization, so it's not itself people. The law is a statement made by people.
Government is by consent in the sense that you need many people to voluntarily cooperate to run a government. That doesn't mean that the government doesn't impose those people's preferences on others by means of violence. The same applies to gangs and other similar organizations. They are run by consent, but that doesn't mean everyone who interacts with them are doing so consensually. Being able to move out of the gang/state territory doesn't make the interaction consensual.
Governments usually try to maintain a monopoly on violence, so when other organizations use violence to impose its members' preferences, it's usually either in defiance of the government or on behalf of the government. Governments also often use violence on behalf of others. When an employee is (indirectly) forced to work for a corporation, it's almost always enforced by the violence of a government rather than the corporation itself.
> A corporation is made up of people. You cannot take away their free speech without infringing in the free speech of individuals.
That kind of reduction doesn't work, given that corporations necessarily (and sometimes optionally) impose various limits on the speech of their employees and contractors — NDAs and non-disparagement clauses from them directly; anti-cartel rules, customer data privacy including but not limited to GDPR, and national security letters from legal obligations.
NDAs and non-disparagement clauses are consensual and can be agreed between individuals as well. They have nothing to do with corporations as such. Laws and regulations are ultimately enforced by means of violence against individuals. When the government is sending a national security letter, it's not threatening to lock up the paper the corporation's articles of incorporation are written on, it's threatening to lock up individual human beings who will remain in prison no matter what happens to the corporation afterwards.
All contracts are legal abstractions, as are corporations themselves. “Voluntary” is a bit of a slippery concept in a world where the unemployment rate is deliberately kept above zero to avoid the inflationary consequences of it being exactly zero (see also: every argument about if is sex work consensual or not). Every aspect of corporate nature exists only as an emergent phenomena of the legal environment, likewise the laws and regulations that you accept are ultimately enforced by means of violence.
However, contrary to your claim, that violence can also be directed at assets under the control of a corporation and not just the natural persons. Indeed, in many cases, the whole fundamental point of a corporation is that individuals often should not be held responsible for the corporate actions. So, while fines and penalties for non-compliance can be directed against individuals, this is not the norm, and they are usually directed against the corporation itself; if this exceeds the corporate bank account, then in certain jurisdictions it can become a legal obligation to declare bankruptcy at that point as otherwise it becomes “trading while insolvent” which can result in individuals being banned from sitting on a board of directors for a certain period. The very brief introduction I had to corporate law at university called this “piercing the corporate veil”.
