The Supreme Court decision

[gwillen]

For those on my flist, if any, who support the Court's decision in /Citizens United v. FEC/, I would be interested to know your answers to the following questions:

Is a toaster a person?

Is a corporation a person?

Can you explain the difference?

What would it mean for a toaster to have a right to free speech?

What does it mean, precisely, for a corporation to have a right to free speech? This is not the same as the free speech rights enjoyed by any of the people involved as individuals -- this, as ruled by the court, is a separate right, belonging to the corporation as an entity in and of itself, completely independent of the rights of any of the individuals involved.

Can you explain the difference?

ETA: Justice Rehnquist's dissent in /First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti/
makes for excellent reading on the subject.

Comments

[platypuslord.livejournal.com]

It sounds to me like the problem is not so much that we want to prevent corporations from communicating, as that we would like to prevent entities from efficiently spending money to affect our political process. In other words the problem is that our political system is too easy to influence via advertisement.

To the extent that Law 441b was doing something to hold that off, I guess it's sad to see it go. But I feel like there ought to be better ways to fix the problem than censoring corporations' political expression.

In particular, what if we had a law that let us aggressively prosecute political entities that make demonstrably false statements? (cf. this long and bitter rant from FiveThirtyEight.) Considerable tuning would be necessary.

Alternatively, maybe in ten years' time the Internet will make television advertising obsolete. That will have its own set of problems, of course (it will make it even easier to "live in a bubble" and only read news sources we already agree with), but maybe it will make it more difficult to influence elections via brute advertisement.

What if we develop strong web-of-trust technology that lets us annotate communications as false or misleading? In some sense this is just an antispam problem such as we have already solved for the email domain. (And, IMO, it's a technology we badly need anyway.)