“What‘s at stake here is the ability of one platform that serves as a forum for the speech of billions of people to use its enormous power to censor speech on the basis of its own determinations of what is true, what is hateful, and what is offensive.”

I feel like the ACLU is trying to obfuscate the issue here.

Are they claiming that spreading outright falsehoods should be protected by a private entity? Facts are facts, there is no reason to protect speech such as “the Holocaust didn’t happen” or “Obama wasn’t born in America.”

Thanks to Facebook’s interpretation of “free speech” we have seen the entry of hate groups and the entry of conspiracy theorists into the mainstream of American society. They owe this rise to the fact that they are allowed to spread misinformation and falsehoods without check.

You always hear this talk of a “slippery slope” where if one form of speech is suppressed, then it will spread to other forms of speech and thus shrinks the market of ideas. What has happened with Facebook is that the slippery slope has gone the other way and the market of ideas has been flooded by falsehoods and misinformation, fueling hate groups and far right positions. It has pretty much led us to the verge of having a government that suppresses the truth, which is much, much worse than a private entity that cracks down on lies.