InfoWars reporter tries to 'fact check' claim that Facebook is a private company -- gets owned!

[TheBlackAdder]

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InfoWars reporter Millie Weaver on Tuesday publicly humiliated herself by botching the basic terminology of economics journalism to try to claim Facebook is a public utility.

After Facebook axed Jones’ Facebook page this week, Weaver and other InfoWars supporters have tried to claim that this amounts to an unconstitutional violation of the website’s free speech.

The flaw in this argument is that Facebook is a privately run company that can make decisions about whether to give individual media outlets a platform — and the Constitution clearly states only that the government cannot do anything to restrict free speech.
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“Dear Libtards who think Facebook is a privately owned business,” she writes on Twitter. “There’s a thing called fact-checking. Facebook is a public business that’s publicly traded. Using that argument to justify banning Alex Jones doesn’t work.”

Twitter showed no mercy! Check it out!


https://www.rawstory.com/2018/08/infowars-reporter-tries-fact-check-claim-facebook-private-company-gets-utterly-humiliated/

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[MineralMan]

1. Millie's not too bright, it seems.

Oh, well...

[lark]

2. Great comments.

I love Twitter at times.

[angstlessk]

5. I agree with this poster...

Sometimes I wonder how reightwingers remember how to 'take in a breath, then push it out'


♨️Saucy Stacey♨️
@DrSCubed
Replying to @Millie__Weaver
I'm fairly certain this woman's playlist is composed exclusively of a reminder to breath on loop.

[lapfog_1]

3. Think of Facebook as the world's biggest neighborhood bar

which happens to have issued stock to the public.

It's still a private bar that can "refuse service to anyone" and employ bouncers to toss people out if they are creating a disturbance.

[Gothmog]

4. Are Facebook and YouTube quasi-governmental actors?

The First Amendment only applies to governmental actors https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2018/08/07/are-facebook-and-youtube-quasi-governmental-actors

Barring Mr Jones from social-media sites limits his reach, but does it violate his freedom of speech? Not under any live understanding of the constitutional principle. The First Amendment’s ban on “abridging the freedom of speech” means the government may not censor or punish expression. No arm of the state may discriminate by viewpoint when setting the rules for a public forum. Even offensive and hateful speech is permissible under the Supreme Court’s expansive conception of free expression, unless it intrudes on one of a few very narrow carve-outs including direct incitement to violence or so-called “fighting words”—epithets uttered in someone’s face that could spark a brawl. But private companies are not the state. Apple, Facebook and YouTube can write their terms of service as they wish and police posts as they choose. If they do not want to host content they deem abusive or manipulative, they do not have to.

Laurence Tribe, a constitutional-law expert at Harvard, points out a small but fascinating caveat to this bright line between governmental and private censorship. “A very limited set of nominally private actors have been recognised as essentially governmental,” he says, in a few narrow contexts. For example, in Marsh v Alabama (1946), a company-owned town was told the First Amendment prevented it from arresting a Jehovah’s Witness for distributing religious pamphlets near a post office. The Supreme Court ruled that the town, though privately owned, functioned like a traditional municipality and needed to respect the proselytiser's constitutional rights.

Do Facebook and YouTube constitute quasi-governmental actors that should be held to constitutional standards when regulating their vast marketplaces of ideas? Mr Tribe says that under current law, they aren’t. But he worries that if these “hugely influential and far-reaching entities” are “capricious” or even “partisan” in their rule-enforcement, the ideal of an open society may be compromised. “After all,” he says, “some of these ‘private’ entities are every bit as powerful as any single state or as most entire nations.” What that means for the contours of free speech in the social-media age is not immediately clear. It is, he says, a “profound puzzle” how to envision a legal framework in which these companies might be held to account for their editorial decisions without undermining their autonomy to “filter out vicious, dangerous and demonstrably false and misleading pseudo-information”.

[dalton99a]

6. Ignorant and stupid.

[hlthe2b]

7. Good gawd.. Did she even get through elementary school?

Damn, RWers are ignorant.

[thucythucy]

8. And arrogant.

Notice the smug use of "libtards."

The worst of them all seem to think they're so much smarter than anyone else. All part of the "Get a Brain Morans" cohort.

[Gothmog]

9. Toon-A public service announcement about the First Amendment

[Gothmog]

10. If you work for Breitbart, then you have to be an idiot

Link to tweet

[uponit7771]

11. Is this the Onion? jms

[Gothmog]

12. Trump Twitter account is not covered by First Amendment