Twitter’s Trump ban no free speech issue, experts say
WhenSimon WASHINGTON—
& Schuster canceled itsplans thisweektopublishSen. Josh Hawley’s book, he called the action“a direct assaultonthe First Amendment.”
Andwhen Twitter permanentlybannedPresidentDonald Trump’s account Friday, his family and his supporters said similar things. “We are living Orwell’s 1984,” Donald Trump Jr. said— onTwitter. “Free-speech no longer exists in America.”
The companies’ decisions may have been unwise, said scholarswho study the First Amendment, but they were perfectly lawful. That is becausetheFirstAmendment prohibits government censorship and does not apply to private businesses.
It is certainly possible to violate the values of the First Amendmentwithout violatingtheamendment itself. But thebasic legalquestioncould hardly be more straightforward, saidRonNellAndersen Jones, a lawprofessor at the University of Utah.
“It’s become popular — even among those who plainly know better — to label all matters restricting anyone’s speech as a ‘First Amendment issue,’” she said. “But the First Amendment limits only government actors, and neither a social media company nor a book publisher is the government. Indeed, they enjoy their own First Amendment rightsnot to have the government require themto associate with speech when they prefer not to do so.”
Butmany inthe legal community were still uneasy about the developments, whichunderscoredthe enormous power held by a handfulofsocialmediacompanies.
“I want a wide range of ideas, even those I loathe, to be heard, and I thinkTwitter especially holds a concerning degree of power over publicdiscourse,” saidGregory Magarian, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
“The First Amendment doesn’t require any private forum to publish anyone’s speech,” he said. “Neither Twitter nor Simon & Schuster has any obligationsunder the First Amendment.” He added: “We should worry about private power over speech, but presidents and senators are the last speakersweneed toworry about.”