The First Amendment was written to limit the government’s power.
In the 18th century, only the state was conceived as possibly wielding the power to keep free people from speaking their minds.
Thus, if maintaining a free people requires free speech, it followed that the government must be kept from controlling speech. For a long time, no more was necessary, but that would change.
The government’s attempts to restrict free speech have mostly been rebuffed.
Some efforts, like the censorship at issue in the 2010 case of Citizens United v. FEC, nearly succeeded, but most failed and failed quickly. The struggle for free speech in law tends toward greater liberty.
Today, however, something novel is happening in America: private actors have become a greater threat to free speech than the government is.
Part of that comes from a laudable achievement — we have tamed free speech’s historical foe, the state.
But part also comes from the rise of new means of communication that not only displace the old, but are uniquely susceptible to monopolization in a way the old media were not.
That means that for the first time, corporate power might be a greater threat to our rights — especially our right to free speech — than the power wielded by the state.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/23/is-big-business-now-a-greater-threat-to-free-speech-than-government/
Discuss.