kerkko.fi

We are living in an age where a decreasing number of firms serve as a kind of Master Switch over speech on the internet -- think Google, Facebook, the cable industry, and the major telephone carriers. These firms are already under strong pressure to censor from powerful governments, religious groups, political parties, and essentially any outfit with a reason to want information suppressed. On a daily basis, as we speak, internet companies are making speech-related decisions more important than those made by any government.

This is what speech management looks like in 2010. No one elected Facebook or YouTube, and neither one is beholden to the First Amendment. Nonetheless, it is their decisions that dictate, effectively, who gets heard. The American public needs to be aware of the dangers that private censors can pose to free speech. The American Constitution was written to control abuses of power, but it did not account for the heavy concentration of private power that we see today. And in the end, power is power, whether in private or public hands.