In 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.”
Does it?
Every two-bit authoritarian in history has justified censoring its citizens as a way of protecting them from the menace of disinformation.
But social media sites, contra the reliably illiberal Harris, aren’t “directly speaking” to anyone. Millions of individuals are interacting and speaking to millions of other individuals. Really, that’s what grinds the modern left’s gears: unsupervised conversations.
Take the Brazilian Supreme Court panel that unanimously upheld the decision by one of its justices to shut down Elon Musk’s X over alleged “misinformation” fears.
We must assume that the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, who once promised to ban guns via an executive order, agrees with Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s decision to shut down a social media platform for refusing to bend to the state’s demands of censorship.
The Associated Press reports that the Brazilian high court’s decision “undermines the effort by Musk and his supporters to cast Justice Alexandre de Moraes as an authoritarian renegade who is intent on censoring political speech in Brazil.”
Really? Because it seems to me that the state shuttering one of the popular social media sites unmistakably qualifies as a ban on political speech, whether one person is responsible or an entire government.
And make no mistake, it is politically motivated. “Just because the guy has a lot of money doesn’t mean he can disrespect this (country),” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva argued. Well, the South American nation’s constitution, like ours, apparently protects free expression — making no distinction between the poor and rich: “Any and all censorship of a political, ideological, and artistic nature is prohibited.” You can tell Brazil is super serious about the matter because the bullet point appears in Chapter V, Article 220, or page 148 in my translated copy.
Let’s concede, however, that de Moraes isn’t any kind of renegade, merely a conventional Brazilian autocrat. In the same way, Musk isn’t merely another billionaire but a tech CEO who generally views free expression as a neutral principle.
I suppose the best evidence for this claim is the fact that even as Brazil bans Musk’s site, he allows the far-left Lula to have an account on X with 9 million followers.
In Europe, free expression is also ostensibly protected by the constitution. Well, the right is contingent on “national security,” “territorial disorder,” “crime,” “health” and other highly malleable issues that ultimately allow police officers in the United Kingdom and Germany to show up at your door and throw you in prison for offensive posts.
As the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once pointed out, “Every Banana Republic has a Bill of Rights.” The question is: How close are we to being one?
Uncomfortably close is the answer.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that senior Biden administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor” COVID-19 content, including “humor and satire,” during the pandemic. Zuckerberg vowed that he would never let his company be pushed around again. I’m sorry if we don’t take him at his word.
Tech companies enjoy unencumbered free association rights and are free to keep or kick off anyone they desire from their platform, as they should. Before Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now known as X, contemporary left-wingers celebrated the independence of social media platforms. “If you don’t like it, build your own Twitter,” they would say.
OK. But when corporations, who often spend tens of millions each year in Washington rent-seeking and lobbying for favorable regulations, take marching orders from state officials and giant federal bureaucracies on the contours of permissible speech, we have a big problem.
If presidential candidates truly cared about “democracy,” they’d be advocating anti-cronyism laws and forbidding government officials from interfering with or pressuring private entities on speech.
But, these days, many Americans no longer view free expression as a neutral, liberal virtue worth defending. Foremost among them, apparently, is the Democratic presidential ticket.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books — the most recent, “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.” His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that senior Biden administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor” COVID-19 content
The GOP should have pursued this and made it a national discussion, so Cackles couldn’t go on TV and lie about how she supports free speech. Yet another missed opportunity.
ADD to that, the 1st amendment ONLY APPLIES to the govt censoring. SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT the govt..
OR ARE THEY Finally acknowledging that the GOVT essentially is running social media?
For the past 3.5 years of unfettered diarrhetic arse running verbal speech promises, followed by runaway Biden Harris spending governance, whenever Joe or Kamala began to talk about FREE speech, WE THE PEOPLE understood it was time to hold on to our wallets. Everything they proposed came at a high cost, FREE speech became the rarest most expensive commodity of all. The art of the CENSOR was their greatest adventure. First they offered us ice cream and a banana shake, then they created a shaky banana Republic, that resembles more a banana split,,,split in two, with the sane citizens doing battle to hold on to what the insane seek to steal under the guise of government sponsored socialist woke redistribution of honest wealth turned dishonest in the subversive ways of their taking. Sane people only form governments to do collectively what as individuals they cannot accomplish. ANYTHING more creates mischief. The mischief begins when governments designed for SELF-governance begin to do for dependency created PEOPLE, that which they were best designed to do for themselves individually, or at worst at a most local of levels.
The lies, cons, deceptions, hypocrisy, and treachery of this Lying, destructive, corrupt, treasonous, dishonest, unethical Democrat Party cabal and their useful idiot self-serving Camal a Harris know no bounds.
Those who cannot or refuse to obtain their personal wealth and power by honest means of integrity, must of necessity obtain it by underhanded and dishonest means. When given a choice between electing self-governing people who gain wealth and success by honest law abiding means, and those who can only enrich themselves in wealth redistribution of that eaned by others, when you choose the latter and then get defunded, and driven into debt, they only have themselves to blame. If it FEELs too good to be true, it ALWAYS is,,,,and the greater the amount of stolen wealth obtained, the less they can be trusted not to steal more from US. A good and best way to tell who you have been dealing with, is to avoid those well off who always leave office tens or hundreds of times more wealthy than when they entered office, leaving WE THE PEOPLE less well off for having know them. Harris or Trump, the guy who helps you become more successful or the Woman who fears making you more successful and leaves office and you poorer for having known her? This one should be a voter’s no brianer. Just how many mansions paid for by our redistributed tax dollars does one corrupt politician need?
“In 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.” ”
It was not until the government insisted on censorship that the “companies” mad their voices heard: “Yea, Boss!”
More like “BY your command master!”
“The Associated Press reports that the Brazilian high court’s decision “undermines the effort by Musk and his supporters to cast Justice Alexandre de Moraes as an authoritarian renegade who is intent on censoring political speech in Brazil.” ”
Right. You aren’t really a renegade when marching lockstep with the authoritarian regime.