I highly recommend reading “Private Government” by Elizabeth S. Anderson, she explains it much better than I ever could.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to go on a tear about how social media platforms are suppressing users lmao, in fact I think they’re too lenient if anything.

Basically, there are countless principles most corporations obey in service of profit. If our official laws are theoretically built around morality, stability, fairness, etc. corporate “law” is built around the bottom line.

I put law in quotes, because corporations have their own sets of unofficial guidelines and punishments that don’t vary too much from the structure of legal code. But instead of imprisonment being the punishment, it’s firing and denouncement.

Now sometimes this is okay, for instance an abusive middle manager deserves to be fired. But corporations have a massive amount of control over the livelihoods of any laborer who doesn’t belong to a union, and also any small businesses.

This, theoretically, is not the worst thing. Of course private companies have earned private discretion. But corporations obey nearly identical rules, so as corporate consolidation stretches further and further and more unions get busted, we’re shifting towards a world in which we all work for employers who obey the basic set of primary rules, i.e. don’t do or say anything that effects the bottom line.

Like, you see people getting fired because of their social media posts already, as their sentiment could turn away customers. In a world in which every employer obeys this principle, would this not qualify as a sort of First Amendment violation? Is enforced unemployability and the resulting poverty not a punishment worse than probation?