FCC's vision on Free Speech

On November 23, the newly appointed chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, sent this letter to the CEOs of Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

"Over the past few years, Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship. Your companies played significant roles in this improper conduct. Big Tech companies silenced Americans for doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights. They targeted core political, religious, and scientific speech. And they worked—often in concert with so-called “media monitors” and others—to defund, demonetize, and otherwise put out of business news outlets and organizations that dared to deviate from an approved narrative."

"...you participated in a censorship cartel that included not only technology and social media companies but advertising, marketing, and so-called “fact-checking” organizations as well as the Biden-Harris Administration"

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Brendan Carr is hailed by Trump as a "warrior for Free Speech". This shouldn't come as a surprise since Trump doesn't understand words, let alone concepts. But the way Carr's letter is formulated might fool the average reader into believing that it does indeed stand for Free Speech. It doesn't. Quite the contrary.

Carr's trick is to package into the word "censorship" two concepts that are very different from a political perspective.

The first is what Facebook and other platforms do: filter content. Most content is produced by third party users who have explicitly and freely agreed with Facebook's filtering process. The producer's content is subject to Facebook's standards, policies, opinions, moods, feelings, whims and beliefs, whether right or wrong, true or false, real or imagined. No content producer should expect Facebook to blindly accept on its own platform every single post. Facebook has never promised, or agreed in any way, to allow all posts regardless of their content.

The second concept is what governments do: threaten individuals or companies to suffer consequences if they don't comply with the governments' moods, standards, beliefs and whims. Only this concept is indeed censorship.

The crucial difference between the two concepts is the explicit, free agreement between two parties in the first case, as opposed to the forced, unchosen, dictatorial character of the second. A producer who disagrees with Facebook's standards may choose to switch to another platform, or create his own. A producer whose ideas go against the government's ideology has no choice but to retract the post, to abstain from expressing his view, to simply shut up.

Only censorship is a violation of Free Speech. Content filtering is not. The First Amendment applies ONLY to government.

Carr's letter is a violation of the First Amendment, infringing therefore on Facebook's right to Free Speech. The threat tries to be veiled, but it is evident:

"I am confident that once the ongoing transition is complete, the Administration and Congress will take broad ranging actions [...] and those actions can include [...] a review of your companies’ activities...".

Carr simply cannot be so dumb as to believe what he wrote. He might have been a warrior for Free Speech in the past, now he's turned into a boot licking hypocrite.