“The civil rights movement was not fought to vindicate free speech rights under the First Amendment. It was a fight to fulfill the promise of full citizenship and human dignity guaranteed to black people by the 14th Amendment. To use the struggle of those extraordinary heroes as a rationale for protecting Facebook users who seek to incite the same kind of division and violence those heroes faced turns that history on its head.
Facebook must do more than stand in the reflected glory of those who sacrificed much to create our modern democracy. It must stand in the harsh light of truth and confront the enormous responsibility of stewarding a platform that influences hundreds of millions of people and the potential uses of that platform that threaten our democracy.”
Read the full op-ed here.
