How free is free speech if corporations can suppress it?

In the event of cloudflare dropping the dailystormer the head of dailystormer came out and said that people inside cloudflare said they supported the site. And that was what pushed the CEO over edge to nuke them. The content wasn’t the issue. It was them making it sound like they were buddies with dailystormer. And that can fuck your business.

And yeah.. Businesses have to fight for talent. I don’t want to work with openly racist people, or pedos, or whatever. I will go elsewhere.

The solution is actually pretty simple. Do work at work and STFU. And that goes both ways.

The way some people toss out the word “corporations” as a bogeyman… they don’t have nearly as much power as is frequently supposed. Unlike governments, for-profit enterprises are highly sensitive to market forces. And when the market says “We don’t like this speech”, they comply. When the market alternatively says “We don’t like suppression of that speech”, then they also comply.

Marketers tend to be very sensitive and generally err on the side of liberalism. Not that I mean “liberal politics” (as the term is frequently misused in the USA as a stand-in for “progressivism”), but liberal as in “more free”. So the speech that is generally unprotected in the corporate world is the type of repressive speech: racist, misogynistic, anti-LGBT, etc. and other forms of speech that are generally considered offensive these days by a majority of folks.

But even so, that speech finds no end of outlets.

Even a major corporation such as General Electric, for example, which boasts over 300,000 employment (world-wide) only represents less than 0.1% of the American population – and that employment number is their world-wide employment, so their American employment is a much lower percentage of the American population. And though the company won’t endorse or even tolerate “under their auspices” speech that they find to be offensive, they can’t control everything that their employees do or say outside of work. And no one can control what people think, or what they say privately.

And “major” employers such as that do not employ the majority of working Americans even in the aggregate. So there’s a lot of leeway, even if major public employers seem to toe the same line.

Don’t forget (though you’re too young to remember, so it’s a thing you’d have to look up to know and then not forget) it wasn’t too long ago in our history that having views that are diametrically opposed to what is considered acceptable today could get you fired. That is, if one expressed support for various “oppressed minorities”: women’s rights, LGBT acceptance, racial equality, etc. – that was anathema.

Pendulums swing. As long as people aren’t overly stupid and overly militant and violent in their causes, there’s room for all of us to speak our piece and get along.

(My friend and I were debating this; that was what inspired the question).

One point that was made was that it isn’t just divisive racist, sexist, etc. speech that corporations clamp down on, it’s also criticism of corporations themselves. And they can always shout over you much louder.

But good points, @CWOTUS. I also am sometimes skeptical of the power ascribed to corporations, but I don’t think that their influence can be discounted too easily.

@DominicY :: I was fired from Kodak on 9/13 2001. On 9/11 they just put up a paper on the time machine for all of us that came to work at 8PM on 9/11. It was bullshit about how they want us to spend time with our family on this horrible day.

A phone call would have been nice. It took 5 bucks on the bus and three hours to get to work and back.

But a printed paper on the time machine. IN FUCKING COMIC SANS no less.

So a few days later I was on break and mentioned there was no work and that is why we didn’t have to come in. They didn’t give a fuck about 9/11.

Next day I come in and my timecard doesn’t work. I let out a WTF.. And then the boss looks over and looks back at his computer. So I just toss my my keys in his direction and walk off. Then on my way out I remember I have my card for the timecard machine so I slide that under the door.

I was buddies with the lead in the print room and he confirmed that there was no work and that is why we were sent home. And he said that they have to legally pay you for four hours if you work for a single minute and are sent home. So prevent people from even trying to sign in.

And I was sacked for being critical and questioning Kodaks patriotism.

Luckily I was going to quit in a few weeks to start college so I didn’t care that much.

And what’s a government guarantee of free speech worth if corporations own the government?

“Corporations can ensure that the people with the “wrong views” won’t be hired…”

As the owner of an S-Corp, it would be very bad for my corporate image if I were to hire or work with Ku Klux Klan members. Their right to free speech should not jeopardize my corporate image.

“Should people really be fired for saying the wrong thing?”

Saying… is speaking. Speaking is something one does. A person can be fired for doing the wrong thing.

Eh, you have the right to say whatever you want, but nobody’s obligated to provide you a platform to say it from.

Sure, but when all the platforms are controlled by a few corporations…

“The market will handle it” is often the dictum, but behemoths like Facebook and Amazon are hardly subject to the market’s whims as much as they are the market. They might receive some backlash for whatever speech issue they embroiled in, but the effect is often minor at best.

The great thing about freedom of speech in the current age is and has been the internet itself.

Who cares who owns the corporations if no one is listening to them any more? What we’ve been seeing for more than a decade now has been the death throes of printed newspapers – and it’s an open question whether they can survive for long online in a video age with ad support. And we’ve started to see the death of the entire “mainstream media” empires themselves. They believe themselves to be important, and if you watch their broadcasts on television and online they certainly puff themselves up that way… but their viewership is declining.

I’m not some philistine who believes that “we don’t need no news”, but it’s pretty clear that we can get news and “less biased” information from any number of sources on the distributed platform of the internet.

And of course we can get all sorts of made-up crap on the internet too; the internet has allowed misinformation to spread more quickly than ever. But on the plus side the internet allows more freedom to discern the crap from the genuine, and doesn’t allow one entity to control information and determine what “the people” need to hear. Yet even the internet is not completely free. The major social platforms are all owned by companies with agendas and the ability to take down content they don’t like. That’s part of what I’m getting at with the question.

“Facebook and Amazon are hardly subject to the market’s whims as much as they are the market.”

The crowd runs the cloud. The crowd can vote FB & AM off the island any time they want.

Corps own the immediate power. Crowd owns long term power.

This came up where I work. Someone whose job included communications with clients was interviewed on The Daily Show about healthcare. He came across as foolish and insensitive; his main response to the question “what do you tell people who can’t afford health. Care?” Was ” don’t be poor.”

The clip was repeated, by the next day it went viral. We got calls from clients all over the country that they would never deal with him. A lot it was that going on the Daily Show demonstrated poor judgment.

He was let go two days after his 15 minutes of fame.

@DominicY :: you seem to think the facebook is your only avenue you spread your voice. I get really racist at the pubs.