Free Speech and Social Media

Facebook MFWIC Mark Zuckerberg has come out against private enterprise censoring politicians’ speech or the news we citizens choose to consume.

Sort of.

Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in which he pushed back, a little, against Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth’s (D, MA) demand that he censor President Donald Trump’s commentary on Facebook.  But he continues to show that he doesn’t take free speech seriously.

He wrote

…a strict First Amendment standard would mean allowing content like terrorist propaganda or bullying.

“Would mean” means Zuckerberg continues to feel free to impose his personal version of censorship on the rest of us.

At Facebook, we’re focused on addressing viral misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm, like misleading health advice. We’ve built specific systems to remove threats such as child exploitation. In countries at risk of conflict, we take down content that could lead to imminent violence or genocide, and we’ve built systems that can detect risks of self-harm within minutes.

Then he wrote, with a straight face,

There are diverging views on what people consider dangerous.

But Zuckerberg’s view is Better.  He’s even developing Algorithms to execute on his superiority.

Which is another reason to insist in a strict First Amendment standard. We have perfectly fine laws dealing with conspiracy to commit crimes, incitement to violence, child (and other) pornography, human and drug trafficking, etc. Those laws are correctly applied through our legal system.

No private enterprise should be in the business of defining for itself or its Precious Woke management what constitutes conspiracy or incitement.

Full stop.

Red Flag Law in Action

It seems an old veteran in Massachusetts had his legally-owned firearms confiscated by the local police—for no reason at all, other than a waitress chose to call the cops on him after eavesdropping on a part of a private conversation he was having with a friend in her restaurant. The waitress’ uninformed tattling also got him fired from his school-crossing guard job.

While he was at a local diner, [Stephen] Nichols was speaking to a friend about a school resource officer who apparently was constantly leaving his post to go for coffee in the morning.
Nichols said he was worried somebody would come in and “shoot up the school” while the officer was out on one of his coffee runs.

The waitress, having eavesdropped on only part of Nichols’ conversation (and I fail to see how she could not know she’d snooped on only part of the conversation), reported the “shoot up the school” part to the police.

There’s more:

[Tisbury Police Chief Mark] Saloio and another officer relieved Nichols of his crossing guard duties while he was in the midst of performing them and subsequently drove to his home and took away his firearms license and guns.
“He came up and told me what I said was a felony but he wasn’t going to charge me,” Nichols said of Saloio.

No charges, but his firearms were seized, anyway by the government’s officers.

And this:

Asked if he was given a letter or any paperwork for the seizure of his license, Nichols said, “No he just told me to hand it over so I took it out of my wallet and handed it to him.”
Nichols said he has been licensed for firearms since 1958.

Nichols has since had his crossing guard job reinstated, but the State still refuses to return to him his firearms license and his firearms.

This is the Progressive-Democrats’ (and too many Republicans’) red flag law in action.

The restaurant where this PC sewage went down is Linda Jean’s in Oak Bluffs, next door to Tisbury on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.  Linda Jean’s owner, Marc Hanover, appears to be trying to wash his hands of the whole sordid affair.

He said he believes one of his servers “overreacted.”

Hanover apparently has chosen to do nothing about his waitress, whose anonymity has been carefully protected, even as the woman has dragged a good man’s name through the mud.