In a video on Oct. 13, Instagram influencer and photojournalist Motaz Azaiza shared footage of the rubble of an apartment, the site of an Israeli bombardment that killed 15 of his family members.
He turns the camera on himself first, visibly upset, and then shows the scene—the ruin of the building, a bloodstain, a neighbor carrying a child’s body draped with a shroud.
In response, Meta restricted access to his account.
Any website owner has the right to decide if he wants to remove certain content on his website. That is not an infringement of free speech.
It is an infringement of free speech as a concept.
It is not an infringement of US law as the relevant protections are limited in scope to governmental actions.
Obviously US law and even more so the supreme court’s interpretations of them are flawed, both on a moral level (big corps should also not be allowed to censor speech) and a logical level (censoring speech is free speech, corps are entitled to human rights).
