Letters From Facebook Jail: Day 7

Freedom Of Speech...If Corporations Say It's Okay

In times past, much of public life was conducted in the public square. Should someone feel the need to share something with his fellow citizens, he would literally get up on a soapbox to address the people who were there. Assuredly, a good amount of them were cranks, and a good deal more were simply annoying, but by and large, it was an accepted practice. If the speaker was speaking nonsense, the people wouldn’t hesitate to talk back to him, as one would a performance one did not appreciate. In this way a public speaker could be booed off the stage, as it were.

Walmart is probably the closest thing we Americans have nowadays to a physical public meeting place. The next time you are at a Walmart, try this experiment: stand up on an empty packing crate, try speaking your mind to fellow shoppers, and see what happens. I’m guessing your behavior won’t be tolerated for very long. You see, Walmart has bought the property where the public square once was. And was given a tax subsidy to do so.

Facebook is the virtual equivalent of the public square. The only difference between the public square and Facebook is that a corporation decides who your message goes to and what you are permitted to say. It is like a public square where Mark Zuckerberg rents out megaphones to those who can afford them and shouts into a megaphone at those who are not approved by Facebook.

There are other places you can go to speak of course, places where mega-corporations are not deciding who will be heard. But few people ever go there. Just as the public land has been mostly bought up, so too are the prime internet hotspots controlled by corporations that have interests in spreading corporate narrative. You still have freedom, it just doesn’t mean much anymore.

The authors of the Bill Of Rights sought to protect our freedom of speech. The fact that the First Amendment specifically states that it protects our freedom of speech from government and not corporations is because our Founding Fathers could not have imagined the kind of power that corporations now wield in our society. In fact, they were rather careful not to give undue power to corporations in the first place. The power that exists now in the hands of corporations is beyond anything our Founding Fathers would have dreamed of. Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution does it state that the rights of corporations were paramount in the minds of those who wrote it. Clearly, clearly, they were concerned with the rights of individuals.

To say corporations have the right to silence you is to say the rights of corporations supersede the rights of individuals. Which is to say that the rights of capital supersedes human rights. As it now stands, you have the right to the pursuit of happiness, so long as your happiness does not conflict with the interests of corporations. Should your pursuit of happiness be in opposition to the pursuit of profit of a corporation, even a corporation that does not pay any taxes, guess whose interests are going to win out?

It’s pretty self-evident that corporate interests would want to control the means of information dissemination, isn’t it? For the same reason they spend billions of dollars on advertising, it is in their best interest to control what information we receive. Jeff Bezos didn’t buy The Washington Post because he saw newspapers as a growing market. While Facebook is a different situation, it is still in the best interests of corporations and those who most profit from them to insure social media is in the hands of billionaires, because to be in the hands of billionaires is to be under the control of billionaires.

We need democratic media. If we do not have that then we cannot pretend to have democracy. It might seem somewhat paradoxical to state that if we want open and democratic media we have to speak up for it, but it is perhaps more clearly understood if it is stated that should we neglect to demand our rights, our rights will surely be taken from us. 

Corporations DO respond to the people. But they do so in the same way wolves responds to people, because their interests are the same. They are by nature predators, and they will take everything they can from you. If you are not vigilant, they will sneak up while you are not looking and take from you everything they can. Do not delude yourself on this essential point. The only difference between a wolf and a corporation is wolves do not seek to control the means of communication.

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