Yahoo Removing Your Stock Board Comments Is Not A Violation Of Your First Amendment Rights
from the freedom-to-post? dept
Eric Goldman points us to the latest silly lawsuit against Yahoo. This time, it's a guy who posted a bunch of comments on various stock forums, and when Yahoo appears to have canceled his account, he sued the company for violating his First Amendment rights. You can read the full lawsuit below:Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: first amendment, stock forum
Companies: yahoo
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Huh?
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duh?
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Re: duh?
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If the courts think this person is wasting their time they can say so .... what exactly is your point ?!!
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Will he win, that depends
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"I'm American. I respect the Bill of Rights. Freedom of Speech is one of the greatest parts of being American. That being said, you have no rights in here, whatsoever."
Private companies can do what they want with their property. Yahoo can take down any comments they want and block whoever they want for basically whatever reason they want. They won't win awards for overusing the power, and using it too much will probably get some negative publicity, but it's their right. Same as the way newspapers aren't legally obligated to publish letters you send in to them; it's not a violation of your rights, it's an enforcement of theirs.
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unrelated tangent: if it's a spoken untruth it's slander; if it's a written untruth, it's NOT slander, it's libel.
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Free speech is vs the government, not vs. private property
Accusing someone of a crime or unethical act with no evidence to back it up is indeed a good reason for an admin to ban your account, and it appears that's what happened here.
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