Regulations Required for Revival: Why Social Media Postings and Search Engine Results Must Be Regulated to Save the Public’s Free Flow of Information

Abstract

This paper argues the U.S. can and should regulate social media and search engines as commercial speech of the corporation instead of non-commercial individual speech. This is because the American individual’s speech on these platforms has been modified, edited, and transformed into the corporation's own commercial speech to advance the corporation’s economic interests. This paper proposes that social media and search engines should be required to either: (1) stop filtering of an individual's speech based on a corporation's economic viewpoints, in order to advance the interests of individual Americans and the political interests of the United States; or at the very least be required to, (2) take a balance approach to their filtering making it actually content neutral, and censor both sides of the spectrum equally, resulting in a fact-based social media. Such regulations comply with the First Amendment in view of the background of the Supreme Court’s rulings on types of speech, including commercial versus non-commercial. This paper additionally addresses the rise of foreign actors, such as China, influencing companies' speech through money at the expense of normal American citizens. These citizen's voices are stripped from them, by a foreign government using a U.S. company as a proxy, and is currently allowed under U.S. law. The paper additionally addresses how during a pandemic, such as COVID, people are confined to home by the government and unable to communicate, except almost exclusively through social media, which effectively strips them of their freedom of speech when it is censored.