In a video on Oct. 13, Instagram influencer and photojournalist Motaz Azaiza shared footage of the rubble of an apartment, the site of an Israeli bombardment that killed 15 of his family members.
He turns the camera on himself first, visibly upset, and then shows the scene—the ruin of the building, a bloodstain, a neighbor carrying a child’s body draped with a shroud.
In response, Meta restricted access to his account.
Any website owner has the right to decide if he wants to remove certain content on his website. That is not an infringement of free speech.
Yeah, not in today’s world where they are sock puppets for the government.
It doesn’t matter because no one else can just infringe on your rights either. Rights are not about just protecting you from government, they’re there to protect you from other people.
It is an infringement of free speech as a concept.
It is not an infringement of US law as the relevant protections are limited in scope to governmental actions.
Obviously US law and even more so the supreme court’s interpretations of them are flawed, both on a moral level (big corps should also not be allowed to censor speech) and a logical level (censoring speech is free speech, corps are entitled to human rights).
Except if you have a de facto monopoly on social media which is the digital equivalent of a public forum then you have the ability to effectively curtail free speech.