WQYU – Blog

Short answer is yes and no they do not have to follow the First Amendment, the First Amendment only applies to the government*.

Generally speaking websites that are owned by private citizens should respect the First Amendment and allow their visitors to say what they want to say within reason such as if they have a political opinion they shouldn’t be censored or stifled, however as a visitor you should have respect by respecting the terms that the site has set and you should also understand that a private website owned by a citizen is under absolutely no legal obligation to allow you to say what you want and does have the legal right to censor and stifle your speech as a First Amendment only applies to the government.

* = Generally speaking whether it is a private website or if it is a site that is owned and operated by a government agency they’re most likely going to have terms that they expect everyone to follow in a general sense the terms will most likely prohibit visitors from posting anything that is harmful, defamatory, obscene, contains obscenities, sexually explicit, misleading, false, deceptive, anything that is illegal, promotes and encourage someone to commit a crime or an act of violent/terror.

Anyone can create a petition one example is on whitehouse.gov/petitions. This is a section that is on an official government owned website and that is run by the United States government, this allows anyone to create a petition, to petition the government and saying that they want something to happen or they want something to be changed.

There has been countless petitions that people have created in order to get the current president impeached and people sign the petition. The First Amendment guarantees that the people have the right to petition the government and the government can’t throw the person into jail because they didn’t like what that person said nor can they throw the people into jail who signed the petition.

As far as a private website goes, private websites should not sensor or stifle their users even if some users doesn’t agree with what a person is posting because they always have the option in most cases to block or to hide such content nor are they forced to follow or like what the person is posting.

Websites that are like Facebook, Google Plus, Google, Twitter, MySpace or any other social media networking site or a web hosting company hosting such content does not mean in any way that they are affiliated, endorsing or sponsoring the person or group that is posting such content.

Take for instance infowars.com; the site does get a stigma of promoting hatred, propaganda and spreading conspiracy theories. The hosting provider that they chose to host their site including the dot com registry that’s facilitating their domain name doesn’t mean in any way that they sponsoring, endorsing or affiliated with Infowars.

If a company does choose to take action such as censoring or stifling a person or group, well it may be perfectly legal but that would not stop a backlash and people questioning okay so you censored and stifled them what stops them from censoring or stifling someone else? How far will they go and where do you draw the line? In other words it could become a very slippery slope.

Facebook and Google have already decided to take action by removing Infowars social media Pages as far as Twitter goes it doesn’t seem they have taken any action. Perhaps Twitter is deciding to completely stay out and not side with either side, probably the only time that Twitter would actually get involved is if Infowars break the law, and/or violates the terms of use on Twitter.

If you come across something on social media that you don’t like, think it is inappropriate or you think it violates the terms here are a few things you can do

Facebook:

• You can choose to hide a person’s or company’s social media post or block them.
• Hiding someone’s post will just hind their posts from showing up in your feed, however this is NOT a 100% guarantee that you won’t see anything from the person or group that you choose to not see content from.
• If you choose to block them it will centrally work the same way like hiding their post however you will essentially become invisible to each other.

Keep in mind if you choose to hide a person’s or a groups social media post or you choose to block them it is not always a hundred percent guarantee that you won’t see anything from them but at least this should reduce the amount of exposure that you’ll see of their content.

Twitter:

• If you are currently following someone on Twitter you can choose to unfollow them in which you won’t see any of their tweets.
• Just like on Facebook you can hide a person or companies social media post you can do the same thing on Twitter.
• Just like on Facebook you can also choose to block them in which you will somewhat become invisible to each other although if you do block someone you can still see their tweets only if you click on a button that says show tweets.

Keep in mind if you choose to unfollow, hide their tweets, or choose to block them it is not a hundred percent guarantee that you won’t see anything from them but at least this should reduce the amount of exposure you will see of their content.

YouTube:

• If you block someone, blocking will prevent them from commenting on videos you’ve uploaded.
• From the looks like, if you block them, you may still see their videos they have uploaded.

While Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others do remove content that is inappropriate or violates the terms is removed by filter, sometimes it does get past the filter so report it so they can take action.