As for the right being censored.. well let’s just leave the right out of it.. because nobody is really being censored.. right or left.
That’s not true, though is it? I’m not going to defend InfoWars, but I will defend their right to make a bunch of douchbag comments. And they HAVE been censored, out of Youtube, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter, all at once. That’s like 95% of the Internet. Twitter has shadow-banned at least four elected representatives, and countless other right-leaning voices. They banned Candice Owens for the exact same comments made by Sarah Jeong, who they did NOT ban. “Chicks on the Right,” Diamond and Silk, and others have had their channels shadow banned or suppressed. This while even the most vitriolic voices on the left are left alone or even promoted. Even Medium (another Jack Dorsey “platform”) is in on the game, promoting radical leftism in their recommendation while banning voices like Svetlana and others, simply for defending themselves against nastiness from the radicals.
This stuff is happening, and it’s really disingenuous to claim that it is not. There are countless examples, often coordinated by all the biggest platforms (Google, Twitter, Facebook).
But my last point i think addresses someone speaking on a private platform.. you tube whatever, and they decide you know what.. this guy is a liability.. we are shutting him down. Doesn’t mean he can’t go stand on the street corner with a sign blathering the same garbage… he can start his own media website couldn’t he?? nobody said you can’t say that.. they really just said you can’t say that in my company. Don’t they have that right?
The hypocrisy in this statement is stunning.
Yea, that guy standing on a street corner is going to get shouted down by the pink-haired mob in short order, like they do to any conservative voice on a campus or in public that tries to have a debate. These days they are even doing it to conservatives just trying to go out for a quiet dinner or breakfast.
What about Citizen’s United? You support that, right? Because money = speech? So they most powerful media companies, with trillions of dollars in capitalization, can just do what they want to censor certain people, even in coordination, and it’s perfectly okay because, hey “It’s their platform.”
You’re just saying that it’s okay for the wealthy oligarchs to marginalize anyone with an opposing ideology to the gutter. Nicely done.
The biggest problem with that is that these wealthy corporations lobbied for, and got, protection from any liability for any user content on their platforms. They basically claimed to be neutral platforms, and thus couldn’t be held responsible for anything posted on their sites. And they’ve gotten hugely wealthy with that government protection.
But now, they have decided to control the messages on their sites instead. That means they are no longer neutral platforms, they are politically biased publishers. So it’s time to hold them personally accountable for all of their content. After all, they are the ones who are deciding what gets published and what gets suppressed or banned.
The BackPage case is instructive in this regard. If that website’s operators can be held criminally liable for their users’ content, then so can the big corporations that control most of the content on the Internet.
