Clarence Thomas is right about Big Tech, which is why the media are lying about his opinion

“When a user does not already know exactly where to find something on the Internet — and users rarely do — Google is the gatekeeper between that user and the speech of others 90% of the time. It can suppress content by deindexing or down listing a search result or by steering users away from certain content by manually altering autocomplete results,” Thomas explained.

“Facebook and Twitter can greatly narrow a person’s information flow through similar means,” he added. “It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information. A person always could choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail. But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today’s digital platforms, nothing is.”

Thomas then notes that if digital platforms were treated like “common carriers” or public utilities such as telephone companies, instead of private companies, laws could be passed to prevent Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon from excluding users or content they dislike. He acknowledged that these laws would raise other necessary constitutional questions but says that, eventually, the court will have to decide how its legal doctrines, specifically those protecting free speech, affect the “concentrated control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties.”

“The extent to which that power matters for purposes of the First Amendment and the extent to which that power could lawfully be modified raise interesting and important questions,” Thomas concluded.

Thomas is correct as usual. There is no denying that Big Tech wields massive influence over the information we have access to, the things that we can post online, and even the material we can read and purchase. So, of course, this influence raises constitutional questions that demand answers — especially as Big Tech becomes bolder in its attempts to narrow the definition of what it considers protected speech. I’m thinking here of Twitter’s decision to ban Trump permanently, Amazon’s decision to stop carrying a book on transgender ideas because it questioned the Left’s gender ideology, and the coordinated effort by Google, Apple, and Amazon to block Parler, a conservative alternative to Twitter, from the internet.

It would be foolish to look at these recent actions and think we can carry on with the status quo. Eventually, something’s got to give — and right now, it looks like conservatives will be the first to fold.

That was all Thomas said. But looking at the reactions to his opinion, you’d think he called for the end of free speech as we know it or that he endorsed repealing Section 230 or regulating Big Tech in some other way. Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern claimed Thomas wants to “[seize] the means of production” and that Thomas argued Section 230 “violates the First Amendment.”

Stern is lying here. What Thomas writes is that other commentators have argued “immunity provisions like [Section 230] could potentially violate the First Amendment to the extent those provisions pre-empt state laws that protect speech from private censorship.” (Emphasis mine). Nowhere in his opinion does he say he endorses this view.

Moreover, Thomas does not encourage Congress to “transform” social media companies or strip them of their rights. All Thomas points out is that 21st-century platforms are still subject to the First Amendment and that it will be up to the courts to figure out how.

Surprisingly, Stern’s dishonest reaction to this is one of the better ones. Here’s The Nation’s Elie Mystal trying to tie Thomas’s opinion to … white supremacy:

Even former Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, who served as a Republican before becoming a libertarian, suggested Thomas’s goal is to undo Section 230, even though Thomas says no such thing:

The visceral and disingenuous reactions to Thomas’s jurisprudence have become so predictable. It usually means one thing: He has hit the nail on the head — again.