And yet Facebook is a privately owned company and thus should be free to allow or deny any content including particular political ads. Isn’t that the whole freedom of speech thing?
Facebook, like any corporation, has a charter granting it extraordinary powers by the society in which it operates. Implicit in that grant is the idea that the corporation betters society by its existence. If, by reaching a certain scale, that society by necessity has to say "hey, you need to do X because you're not keeping up your end of the bargain", that's completely fine.
> Implicit in that grant is the idea that the corporation betters society by its existence.
Really? I don't think that is a thing, but happy to learn otherwise with a reference to some legal doctrine or legislation that spells this out.
That isn't to say that there can't be additional legislation that regulates an industry beyond the legal infrastructure that enables the formation of a corporation.
You're asking for "legal doctrine". I am pointing out to you telos.
I mean, forget stakeholder theory and other minimally responsible theories of operation, because that stuff is kind of new--just look at judicial dissolution. It exists on the books and it's been done in practice. That ability would have no reason to exist if it were to not protect the United States and its citizens from the malfeasance of a corporate entity to which a charter has been granted.
But this argument is wholly backwards. Why should corporate entities be granted any rights at all? We deign to grant them the status of existence. We, the people, not the fictitious ones but those pesky "natural" ones. Why should a corporation exist for any other reason than to better our society? Why should a society empower random individuals to create liability-shielding immortal pseudopeople if that society doesn't think they're supposed to make that society better by existing?
Hell, go even further. Why should a society do anything if it doesn't make the society in aggregate better for the doing?
> Why should a corporation exist for any other reason than to better our society?
Because it represents liberty. The freedom for people (natural ones) to assemble and organize and pursue their own interests as they see fit.
Our social contract is that the government protects the rights of individuals not that individuals serve the abstract needs of "society".
Of course that doesn't mean that a corporation (or any other group) is outside the law. I'm just pushing back on your notion that there is some abstract litmus test that says a group (corporate or otherwise) must "better our society". I don't even know what that really means and it sounds to me very much like the tyranny of the majority.
> Because it represents liberty. The freedom for people (natural ones) to assemble and organize and pursue their own interests as they see fit.
Liberty requires limited liability now, does it? Strikes me as a very feudal idea of liberty--the liberty to do unto others but to escape them doing unto you.
> I don't even know what that really means and it sounds to me very much like the tyranny of the majority.
It means that a corporation is trusted to not be an asshole to the people giving it its literal-not-figurative superpowers and when that corporation breaches that trust its fictional life can and should be forfeit.
What you call "the tyranny of the majority," I call "a community and a polity having the right to not be mooked by the first con man to come down the pike." Because people, actual people, matter more.
I feel like you are changing the goal posts. I explicitly said that any group isn't above the law. So I'm not exempting fraudulent behavior by any means. Nor did I say that liberty required limited liability. I've tried to suggest that my thoughts are about all sorts of groups, not just limited liability corporations.
What I was pushing back at was your suggestion that a corporation must "benefit society". That particular phrasing is completely open ended in my mind suggesting way too much power to be wielded if you aren't "benefiting society". Perhaps that isn't what you intended but IMHO appeals to "improving society", "helping the children", "the greater good" in the abstract are either power grabs or empty phrases. The specifics mater.
"All sorts of groups"? Only a very few sort of groups need special legal imprimatur to exist. And if you want to be granted special and extraordinary treatment by a community, why would that community not expect you to not be an asshole about it? If you don't want to uphold your end of that bargain there's always the general partnership. It confers no special legal privileges, it's purely contractual, but it's actually a "group of people" rather than A Fictitious Person Created To Avoid Liability. In my experience conflating these is never, never, done for good reasons, so I'd certainly like to hear yours. Maybe it'll be the exception, so lay it on me.
Here's a concrete example of what's actually a power grab: the Dole company literally-not-figuratively knocking over the Hawaiian monarchy and the subsequent creation of the "Republic of Hawaii" as a Dole-owned, Dole-operated state. Why is that not a "power grab" about which you get up in arms? Why is it that it's a "power grab" to say "hey you have a duty to not do that kind of shit"?
What you are categorizing as a "power grab" is a refusal to accept the status quo as legitimate just because it happens to be where we're at right now. Why is it that that advocacy, the use of the state to control its creations, is the "power grab" here--and not the accumulation of that power in the first place?
Or maybe I just got tired of trying to explain myself.
You keep changing the topic and I keep trying to come back to my observation that requiring a corporation to "benefit society" is not actually a thing in law and would be a bad idea in any case.
If your definition of "benefit society" just means "doesn't break laws". Then I would agree with you but there really isn't any need for such indirection and expansive language about "benefiting society" in that case.
So I gathered that you were suggesting that there is some administrative hoop that a corporation must jump through to convince you that they are "benefiting society". But that language is hopelessly broad and just begging to be abused by anyone in power who doesn't like what a disfavored group is doing (even when they aren't breaking any laws).
I bet there are a lot of people who think that Fox News isn't "benefiting society" and I'll bet there are also a lot of people who think that CNN or MSNBC aren't benefiting society. Are you telling me that the majority opinion should hold here and organizations disfavored by the majority can be legislated out of existence because they don't "benefit society"?
Agreed. The ability to assemble and organize and pursue interests is distinct from the specific mode of organization of the limited-liability company, where stockholders (the owners) and protected from liability for the actions of the company. Other modes of organization (a partnership) arepossible, and could be argued to have stronger social outcomes due to the lack of insulation from liability.
This is such a tired argument, but I'll throw this out anyway: the parent isn't claiming that Facebook is legally prohibited from selecting which content they allow through their platform. They are legally allowed to choose to block certain content, but this does not make them exempt from public criticism.
