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Does this apply to media corporations? Or do I have to be the sole owner of a newspaper to have speech rights and if I incorporate I give them up to the state?
And if a megacorp like Amazon (or technically Jeff Bezos) buys a newspaper, does that newspaper suddenly lose its speech rights?
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Yes, to retain the spirit of freedom of speech there needs to be some sort of balancing. As you suggest, giving full government control to corporate speech seems wrong, but so does treating, say, Exxon-Mobil as if they were a biological citizen in that regard. I don't think the law is written here -- at the time of founding corporations were rare and presumably the framers would likely have little issue with restricting their rights. In that case history and tradition reasoning sends the issue to the legislature, though other types of interpretation leave roles for the courts.
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"
Those words mean something to some of us...
Something indeed, and apparently something different to you than what they meant to the people who wrote them.
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