I recently wrote about how the Ohio State University is preventing white supremacist Richard Spencer from speaking on campus. Despite falling under the First Amendment, Ohio State is looking for a legal loophole to block speech it doesn’t agree with.
The semi-comforting news is Ohio State is subject to legal challenge. Not so in cyberspace, which Justice Anthony Kennedy called the “vast democratic forums of the Internet in general, and social media in particular.” There, access to diverse ideas is controlled by corporations and their Terms of Service. Hiding behind the bushes of private ownership, the quasi-public forums on Twitter, Facebook, Google, and their predecessors and successors, skirt the First Amendment to control what people say, read, and by extension, think. They are the censors the Founding Fathers feared.
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