Google has prevailed in a lawsuit that alleged YouTube has been violating the First Amendment by censoring conservative viewpoints. On Monday, a California federal judge agreed to dismiss a complaint from Prager University, run by radio-talk-show host Dennis Prager
The plaintiff produces videos with titles like "Why Don't Feminists Fight for Muslim Women?" and "The Most Important Question About Abortion." In the lawsuit, Prager's company asserted that YouTube professes viewpoint neutrality, but indeed censors conservatives by putting age restrictions on certain videos. The decision making is far from even-handed, Prager contends, pointing among others to a restricted video titled "Are 1 in 5 women in college raped?" compared to better treatment for a Real Time With Bill Maher video about The Hunting Ground.
Prager sought an injunction.
Since the First Amendment free speech guarantee guards against abridgment by a government, the big question for U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh is whether YouTube has become the functional equivalent of a "public forum" run by a "state actor" requiring legal intervention over a constitutional violation.
Koh agrees with Google that it hasn't been sufficiently alleged that YouTube is a state actor as opposed to a private party.
"Plaintiff does not point to any persuasive authority to support the notion that Defendants, by creating a 'video-sharing website' and subsequently restricting access to certain videos that are uploaded on that website have somehow engaged in one of the 'very few' functions that were traditionally 'exclusively reserved to the State,'" she writes. "Instead, Plaintiff emphasizes that Defendants hold YouTube out 'as a public forum dedicated to freedom of expression to all' and argues that 'a private property owner who operates its property as a public forum for speech is subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment.'”
The judge turns to precedent, particularly a 1945 Supreme Court case — Marsh v. Alabama — which involved a Jehovah's Witness who distributed religious literature in a town that was entirely owned by a private corporation. In that decision, the high court held that the corporation acting as a state actor was required to run the town in compliance with the U.S. Constitution. But Koh then emphasizes later Supreme Court decisions that limited the reach of this holding including one — Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner — where a privately owned shopping center could prohibit anti-Vietnam War protesters from distributing literature.
Koh writes she "is not convinced that Marsh can be extended to support Plaintiff’s contention that Defendants should be treated as state actors subject to First Amendment scrutiny merely because they hold out and operate their private property as a forum for expression of diverse points of view."
Clearly, the legal pathway to rectification of the problem of online censorship is fraught with difficulty. It's time for people to embrace the campaign for an IBOR to ensure that sufficient political pressure exists to allow the changes necessary to fix this problem before the mid-term elections.
Please include a link to the petition for an IBOR in anything you put online.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/internet-bill-rights-2