Star Attorney Alan Dershowitz Slams Big Tech Says Censorship Says “Is Not Fair”

Breitbart had this to report: 

During Sunday’s broadcast of New York WABC 770 AM radio’s “The Cats Roundtable,” Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz took aim at big tech companies like Twitter and Facebook for censoring users on their platforms.

Dershowitz said the social media giants are acting as platforms while also acting as publishers, which he said is “not fair” because they have both censorship and immunity.

“Facebook says we don’t like this, and Twitter says we don’t like attacks on Hunter Biden. And once you act as a publisher, you’re a publisher. You know what it means — I mean, you are a publisher. And you can be sued because you’re a publisher,”

These are words taken directly from a Congressional report

In a survey released in March, Pew found that Facebook
dominates the social media landscape with 68 percent of U.S.
adults stating that they use this social media platform online
or on their cellphone.

This same survey found that nearly three-quarters of U.S.
adults use YouTube, a platform with many social media elements
including 94 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds. Also covered in
this survey was Twitter, which controls a smaller demographic,
but nevertheless attracts 40 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds to
its platform.

While it is clear that these numbers show that social media
platforms have direct control over incredible volumes of user-
created content, the method by which these companies manage
this content is far from clear. Facebook, Google, and Twitter
in many cases would like to appear as neutral channels.
YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, for example states that
its purpose is to give everyone a voice and show them the
world. But this goal and those of the others appear wildly
aspirational and do not reflect the true nature of the business
that these for-profit companies engage in.

In reality, these companies, like all other legitimate
businesses, are exercising great care and discretion to ensure
that their services are not abused. For example, we know that
they monitor content to ensure that no illegal activity such as
fraud, piracy, identity theft, and sex trafficking, among
others, is being committed on their platforms. This fact should
not surprise us. Indeed, they are required to do so.
However, beyond illegal activity, as private actors we know
that these companies manage content on their platforms as they
see fit. The First Amendment offers no clear protections for
users when Facebook, Google, or Twitter limits their content in
any way.

Moreover, they maintain terms of service pages which
contain rules that users must agree to abide by in order to use
their platforms, and at least in some cases, when content is
identified as violating a company's terms of service, it is
subject to human review.

There is, however, a fine line between removing illegal
activity and suppressing speech, and while these companies may
have legal, economic, and ideological reasons to manage their
content like a traditional media outlet, we must nevertheless
weigh, as a Nation, whether the standards they apply endanger
our free and open society and its culture of freedom of
expression, especially when it is through these channels that
our youth are learning to interact with each other and the
world.