Will Twitter Be Defined As The Public Square?

This is an interesting idea:

In an article for the Washington Examiner last week, writer Mark Grabowski pondered the idea of whether Twitter’s routine censorship could be unconstitutional. “Most Americans know they can speak their mind in the public square, thanks to the First Amendment. Speech on social media, however, can be censored because private companies own those cyber spaces,” wrote Grabowski on Tuesday. “But a recent Supreme Court oral argument suggests Twitter’s practice of banning controversial right-wing pundits could be deemed illegal.”

Grabowski explained how the internet is now the popular public square, and how legally it should be treated as such.

It makes sense, but what will strengthen the case is there is any political activity by the company that parallels their silencing of free speech. If some company made a device that could neutralize sound waves, and deprive someone of being heard, their using it to silence political speech they disagreed with would clearly be as unconstitutional if they had any political linkages to the parties or politicians. It would be like a private intelligence company performing illegal searches under contract with law enforcement.

The real key though will be the penetration of all these companies by intelligence agencies, as has been prior practice:

More than 400 American journalists … in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters…

In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations…

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were [the heads of CBS, Time, the New York Times, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include [ABC, NBC, AP, UPI, Reuters], Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune…

Those officials most knowledgeable about the subject say that a figure of 400 American journalists is on the low side.

If the President leaked any confirmation of these companies being even slightly influenced by government agencies, then their silencing of free speech could arguably be said to be government-performed limitation of free speech using a private company as a proxy. Even the slightest contamination by government would make the actions of those companies unarguably unconstitutional.

I would think an even better argument would be unfair trade practices, though. Twitter now has a near monopoly, which President Trump could easily use to break it up, or force it to integrate other companies like Gab into it’s architecture seamlessly, so a Gab account would reach Twitter’s followers as easily as a Twitter account.

I wonder how the left will feel about viewing the Constitution as a living document when their precious power-plays to control the dialog are suddenly rendered unconstitutional, by the K-selected activist court system that is coming as we head into the K-shift.

Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because you can’t silence the K