[bigphishy]

Well, I don't even want to touch the first part of this comment, there are smarter people than I that can put that logical fallacy to sleep.

Also, please don't be disingenuous, it is entirely feasible and reasonable to legally distinguish between a blog with 10 monthly visitors, and a corporation with 100 million monthly visitors.

[dane-pgp]

> there are smarter people than I that can put that logical fallacy to sleep.

I won't claim to be smarter than you, but I will attempt to provide some justification for your assertion that "corporations need constitutional rights" is a fallacy.

Firstly, the idea of corporate personhood is a much later invention than the US Constitution itself, and seems to have developed almost by accident.[0] But regardless of its provenance, it is still clear that a natural person and a corporate "person" are two legally distinct classes of entity. To pick a trivial example, corporations are not entitled to vote (or be counted towards congressional representation).

More generally, corporations are not inherent features of the world, but rather legal fictions which exist at the discretion of the society that chooses to grant them existence. A society could, for example, require that all corporations be dissolved, without bumping into the constitutional issues that would arise if such a law was applied to natural persons...

Anyway, it seems to me that the argument for protecting "corporate speech" (such as the ACLU's support of Citizens United[1]) is that as long as corporations exist and are useful vehicles for natural persons to exercise their constitutional right to free speech, then the government can't help but infringe on the First Amendment by targeting that "corporate speech". To say that corporations need constitutional rights is to get the argument exactly backwards.

Instead, the government should put a positive duty onto social media to protect freedom of speech, by forbidding terms of service which ban users based on their (legal) political opinions. Such a regulation need only apply to platforms which are of a size where they are likely to have a disproportionate effect on the national political discourse.

This is not too far removed from existing First Amendment jurisprudence which does allow the government to force health warnings and correct labelling onto products. In fact I would say that a website shouldn't be able to present itself as "social media" if it systematically excludes views that are popular in that society, so the analogy to labelling laws isn't that much of a stretch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#In_the_Un...

[1] https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-and-citizens-united