What does the 1st Amendment mean? Stories from the the insurrection, Part 3

The violent insurrection in Washington, D.C.  Wednesday was both utterly predictable and unimaginable. My feelings about those events go well beyond the scope of this blog, so instead of laying out my feelings, I’m going to share a variety of responses to how our media responded to these events over the next few days.

Following Donald Trump’s tweets on Wednesday that were widely seen as inciting violence in Washington, D.C., the social media company went beyond labeling his tweets and actually blocked three of them and suspended the president’s personal account for 12 hours. Twitter also announced that any future violations of Twitter Safety policies would result in the president being permanently banned from his favorite social media service.

Following this warning, The Washington Post reports Trump continued to challenge Twitter’s policies against hate speech and inciting violence. These tweets led Twitter to permanently ban the president from their platform.

On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the president had been blocked from Facebook indefinitely because “the risks of allowing President Trump to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great….”

On a slightly different note, major publisher Simon & Schuster announced that they were dropping their contract for a book from Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who was one of the leading voices in the U.S. Senate for throwing out the electoral votes for President Elect Joe Biden.

Sen. Hawley claimed this contract cancellation was a “direct assault on the First Amendment.”

This, of course, is nonsense. The only thing Sen. Hawley was being denied was a big paycheck. Anyone who wants to can self-publish through a wide range of services such as Amazon Kindle.  You can even get paid for it if people are willing to buy your book. No one is silencing him. Simon & Schuster just doesn’t want to pay the senator for writing a book.

A former editor of mine wrote on Twitter in response to Sen. Hawley:

By the way “only approved speech can now be published” is how publishing houses are *supposed* to work and is exactly why editors exist in the first place. We try not to sign up authors who go on to become an international embarrassment.

As Sen. Hawley and President Trump demonstrate, there’s a lot of confusion as to what the First Amendment does or does not guarantee. While a full discussion of that topic could occupy a semester-long class, let’s look at it at three levels.

1 – Local TV reporter/anchor Steve White gives a good basic summary:

2 – Media scholar and sometimes WaPo commentator Michael Socolow adds a bit more depth to the topic and reminds us that this isn’t just about social media platforms:

3 – If you want to really go down the rabbit hole of the implications of what Twitter and Facebook have done, the legal-issue Twitter account @Popehat has quite a bit to say about the topic.

The one thing that really does concern me about President Trump having his Twitter account removed is that it takes away a long record of what he had to say, inflammatory and otherwise. Fortunately, there are at least two comprehensive archives of the president’s tweets.

Tomorrow – Headlines and editorials about Wednesday’s riots. (Assuming something else doesn’t break overnight to replace that topic!)