New lawsuit may provide access to social media.
Sex Offender Sues Twitter
Although the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that States cannot restrict a registered sex offender’s access to social media (Packingham v. North Carolina, 582 U.S. ___ (2017)), nothing has stopped social media companies, such as Facebook, from restricting sex offenders from their platforms. A lawsuit filed last week may change that!
Jared Taylor is the founder of the Virginia-based New Century Foundation – a white supremacist organization that was banned from Twitter because of new rules aimed at reducing abusive content. Although we don’t agree with the viewpoints of the Plaintiff, this lawsuit is certainly one in which we hope the Plaintiff prevails.
Taylor is suing California-based Twitter in California Superior Court, alleging that Twitter’s policy of banning him and his organization from their social media platform is unconstitutional and violates Twitter’s own founding principle; to “[g]ive everyone the power to create and share ideas instantly, without barriers.”
The issue in the suit is, “whether Twitter can arbitrarily and discriminatorily ban a speaker from its platform due to nothing more than the controversial nature of the speaker’s viewpoint, political beliefs, and perceived political affiliations.” The issue is very similar to Facebook’s practice of deleting the profiles of registered sex offenders and their policy of banning sex offenders (and their opinions) from it’s platform.
Facebook discriminating against sex offenders?
The suit does not question these social media platform’s rights to block hateful, offensive, abusive, obscene or speech intended to incite. It question’s it’s right to arbitrarily deprive anyone they “don’t like” to speak on it’s “town square”. For a long time we’ve considered a challenge against Facebook’s Terms of Service which ban anyone who is a “registered sex offenders” from their platform. We’ve never moved forward because, candidly, we didn’t think we had the financial resources to go up against one of the top 10 tech companies in the US. This suit may give us some hope!
You can read the complaint below:
I have said this before but I guess I have to say it again. Facebook‘s policy appears to be in conflict with California law. What does that have to do with us in Florida ? Well Facebook is a California company in requires you to submit to California law for dispute resolution as part of their terms of service the same terms of service that exclude us from Facebook. They don’t even have the offensive speech excuse with us
In playing devil’s advocate, I would argue that although technically available to “everyone”, Twitter, et.al.; are private organizations, i.e., “private clubs”, and therfore may not be obligated to adhere to the first amendment as private clubs are wont to do. The clause of exclusivity may fall in that you need to create a password to join. With that in mind, I would hope my assertions to be wrong, although I believe this contention could certainly be made.
Where the private club exception fails is if said club is using any public property. That is what happened to a yacht/fishing club in palm Beach a number of years back. They didn’t own the bay bottom under their dock, but were “leasing” it from the State. California law says that companies may not discriminate in providing “business services.” Facebook is a business service because they take in ad revenue and provide pages for businesses.
These are privately held Companies so they can make up most any rule they want. According to my own research, FACEBOOK currently does not allow Registrants signing up for Personal Page Accounts.
More liberal Twitter is only interested in investigating controversial content and if found to be a disruption to the
General Rules, your account will be suspended or deleted.
I don’t see a case here. True its Internet censorship but its based on a account with a Private Company.
JEV
Many private companies are sued each year. Being private makes it not held to the same standard as government entities however there is still a case. The cake shop owner was private but the rejection of services for some is what is at issue.
Almost every on-line news website requires a Facebook or similar account in order to comment. Can you see where I am going with this? Though it’s undisputae that they are indeed shutting us out from commenting on the most public, most important news forums, It looks to be a huge legal onion to peel back.
I’m equate previous comment to “the banks are too big to fail.” Sure Facbook is private, but they are so dominating the town square that they transcend the average. But if a Judge despises the group that has committed sex crimes, then the difficulty of proving the constitution correct and valid get multiplied exponentially. That gets beyond expensive potentially putting it (the constitution) beyond our reach.
I wonder how white supremacist groups get there clout to be able to take there case to the Supreme Court. What are there maybe 10,000 white supremacists . There are almost a million sex offenders. I know of a case where a guy was put on the registry because of spanking his child. He was in a bad divorce battle with his wife filling charges. There are hundreds of thousands of minor things like this that put you on the list,but they never get known because there not news worthy . But SO can’t even defend themselves on public media like every one else . So the public stays in a blind stopper thinking all on the list are pedophiles and predators. Law inforcement and public media are directly responsible for this ,as are politicians . The idea that you are innocent until proven guilty is a lie. Or that it has to be within a reasonable doubt, again false. No proof, needs to be presented no evidence is needed, only the word of one person against another and who the Jude believes or if you plea who your told the judge will believe. If you kill some one most likely proof is needed to convict be not so with sex offender crimes or so accused crimes,only words this has got to change but we have no voice except this sight thank you FAC
Currently dealing with this issue. The P. O. said he didn’t care if Facebook is used because monitoring software is on all our PCs (which we pay for monthly). Facebook has a zero tolerance stand. But, the company classes are on Facebook so there is no way to learn or participate. Should be some kind of exception. Ever reaching Facebook could at the very least have an exception or blocking, monitoring or something that allows limited viewing. Stupid.
and then there is this…
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17057754/sesta-fosta-passes-congress-cda-230-house-of-representatives
So some guy blew the whistle on Facebook for this data mining scheme. He said they knew for 2 years and said nothing. Their response? They suspended his FB account. LOL.
class action. if every disenfranchised joins together they would win
This was filed 2 years ago is there still no judgement in this case?
Regardless of how you feel about the Trump situation, there is much talk in the media about Congress now possibly broadening the interpretation of the 1st amendment, as Americans are being “robbed of their right to communicate freely and exchange ideas”. I am not saying that you need to agree with all of this, but this concept of all citizens being guaranteed the right to freedom of speech and association and barring government censorship could eventually lead to people on the sex offense registry from being barred by social media, particularly with some courts now ruling that states cannot bar registrants from social media.