My friend Guy Hamilton-Smith wrote this amazing article about how even after the Supreme Court recognized the free speech rights of people on the Sex Offender Registry their rights still remain constrained.
Here is the part that should be important to you, even if you don’t care about arguments about registries, the platforms where most free speech takes place are now fully owned and policed by PRIVATE COMPANIES.
In other words, we all have very limited free speech rights on platforms owned by private companies but most of our speech happens in exactly these corners of the digital public square.
How we will deal with this problem, not just in the area of people on the sex offender registry, will be critical to protecting the core values embodied in the first amendment of the Constitution going forward. In other words, this is a very important article and starts a discussion we all need to be having (if we care about having access to the digital public square).
Further Reading
The Digital Wilderness: A Decade of Exile & the False Hopes of Lester Packingham
