Corporations aren't humans; they don't have free speech rights.
As a matter of law in the United States you are objectively wrong. This has been settled in a series of SCOTUS decisions starting with Buckley v. Valeo (1976). Corporations are legal persons, and further the individual humans that make them up do not somehow lose the free speech rights just because they decide to take collective action.
And in turn: as a matter of morality, common sense and the point of free speech you're also wrong. It's important that people be able to speak to power, and a core part of that for humanity is socializing, being able to form groups to support each other and pool ideas, skills and resources to have a greater effect than what any individual alone could accomplish. Seriously, you say "corporations don't have free speech rights"? Exactly what form of combined effort do you imagine most, say, NEWSPAPERS are organized under? So what, you think individuals should be able to investigate something all by themselves, but the government should be free to put the boot down on newspapers because they're corporations? You think that jives with free speech?
Oh maybe you only meant "the bad ones". That makes it very easy, but no reason to limit it to corps in this case, just stop "the bad humans" too and everything is great. Nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan, since everyone agrees who "the bad ones" are.....
The people in many corporations in fact lose their free speech rights and have to follow the company line. Granted, they agreed to that in their employment contract but this is in many cases a coercive relationship.
> Exactly what form of combined effort do you imagine most, say, NEWSPAPERS are organized under? So what, you think individuals should be able to investigate something all by themselves, but the government should be free to put the boot down on newspapers because they're corporations?
Well, the individual reporters could still be free to exercise their free speech rights without conferring any right on the newspaper itself.
You are quite correct, of course. I meant to write "shouldn't" instead of "don't".
> "So what, you think individuals should be able to investigate something all by themselves, but the government should be free to put the boot down on newspapers because they're corporations?"
I'll point out that there's an entirely separate and intentional carve-out for freedom of the press that is distinct from freedom of speech, so that's not a good justification for corporations to get freedom of speech as a right directly.
>I'll point out that there's an entirely separate and intentional carve-out for freedom of the press that is distinct from freedom of speech
Not really as a matter of law we're talking about here. "The press" isn't some special legal entity, there's no licensing for it or anything. Absolutely critical press victories like NYT v. Sullivan were based on freedom of speech protections.
But whatever, so you don't want Mozilla Corporation to be able to advocate for Firefox if the government doesn't want it to because Google managed to lobby successfully? No company can come out in favor gay rights or Pride Day if the government doesn't want them to? You're fine with with the government being able to punish companies for arguing against encryption backdoors? And what about the individuals at those companies, if the CEO speaks about those things is that the company speaking and punishable or is it ok if he says "this is my opinion" first every time? What about employees?
Like, we can go through a million examples here if you want but I don't think it's that hard to see how maybe government might abuse that just a little bit.
