Corporate "Speech" is Seldom about "Sharing Knowledge"
Justice Kennedy's "knowledge" sharing rationale is being misused to permit unrelated uses.
In the "Citizens United" Supreme Court Case, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that campaign finance laws deny corporations free speech rights and forbid corporations from sharing their "knowledge" with the public:
The government silences a corporate objector, and those corporations may have the most knowledge of this on the subject.
Corporations have lots of knowledge about environment, transportation issues, and you are silencing them during the election.- Justice Anthony Kennedy
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
Oral Reargument - September 09, 2009 (transcript | audio)
This is Out of Touch with Reality
The scenario Justice Kennedy outlined of businesses sharing their knowledge with the public might happen theoretically, but in my experience this is not the most common way that politically active corporations "speak" to the public.
Reality
It is more common in our age of Super Pacs that large politically-active corporations "speak" by funding innocuously-named front groups like the "Great America Pac" who then advertise with appeals to unrelated wedge issues to distract the voters from the corporation's unrelated, or even questionable activities or interests.
Needed: A Better Framework for Understanding Corporate Speech
Up until the advent of the Behavioral School of Economics, most economists based their economic theories upon a "rational actor" model that assumes that people act rationally in a state of perfect information. We now know the inadequacies of this over-simplification. In a similar way, corporate speech laws assume that corporations are significant sources of accurate, and relevant "knowledge" when they "speak" to voters, who respond rationally to this input.
The Corruption of our Democracy is Real
For 100 years, legislators have understood that corporate money threatens to corrupt the democratic process. In "Citizens United," the Justices of the Majority turned their back on this history and treated the corruption of our democratic system as a hypothetical, while overstating the informational value that the public obtains from anonymous corporate "knowledge".
We need to overhaul our current campaign finance laws so that identifiable informational speech is permitted. This speech must have the same type of endorsement as candidates — “I’m Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobile, and I approved this message.” This would allow the type of “informational” speech Justice Kennedy imagined, but not the destructive corporate-funded spending on unrelated wedge issues.