> Private companies' interest should have little, if any, control over the ability of the public to speak
This ignores that private companies are made up of people, and those people have opinions and moral compasses.
If some large number of your employees don't want to be working on a product that provides a platform for speech they believe is reprehensible, what do you do?
If you ignore them, some of them -- perhaps high value employees -- quit. Others, who maybe don't have great job mobility, stick around, but feel miserable, because their job makes them do unethical things. Not a great outcome.
Is free speech for all more important than refusing to sell to people you believe are doing something unethical with your product?
I honestly don't know the answer to that question. My gut reaction is to celebrate Parler effectively getting kicked off the internet, but I do worry that the long-term consequences of doing things like this will haunt us as a society.
The larger problem is that the office of president is out of check since 1945.
For the system to work, no one should believe this one position determines the course of the entire government, but since the 1980s you would be a fool not to.
Given the office of president is out of check and it gets to apply discretion to (in this example) how media companies will be treated both in actual law and whether cases are run, it is only a matter of time before a president builds his route to dictator. Members of whichever party puts him in will be happier for a decade at most, then it's soylent green for everyone.
This ignores that private companies are made up of people, and those people have opinions and moral compasses.
If some large number of your employees don't want to be working on a product that provides a platform for speech they believe is reprehensible, what do you do?
If you ignore them, some of them -- perhaps high value employees -- quit. Others, who maybe don't have great job mobility, stick around, but feel miserable, because their job makes them do unethical things. Not a great outcome.
Is free speech for all more important than refusing to sell to people you believe are doing something unethical with your product?
I honestly don't know the answer to that question. My gut reaction is to celebrate Parler effectively getting kicked off the internet, but I do worry that the long-term consequences of doing things like this will haunt us as a society.