Tag Archives: free speech

More Censorship

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Mark Zuckerberg is at it again, this time blocking a President’s access to his Facebook, which he created explicitly to be a public forum. But only for those of whom he personally approves.

Never mind that President Donald Trump plainly has never intended to obstruct the peaceful transition of power, but merely to continue his fight to ensure only those votes legally cast and counted are counted. That he plainly expected that to demonstrate his reelection rather than confirm his loss is neither here nor there. And it certainly doesn’t compare in the slightest to the refusal to accept the outcome of the 2016 election, and the Left’s and Progressive-Democratic Party’s active and four-year-long attempts to overthrow the President duly elected that year. That was an effort Zuckerberg and his minions at Facebook not only whole heartedly approved, but they actively supported and participated in, going to the point of censoring the President’s speech.

Nor has anything Trump has said or tweeted condoned any part of the assault on the Capital Building.

This is just rank censorship. Which censorship—any censorship—is just the cowardice of those who are terrified of opposing opinions.

The clumsy or rude phrasing of those opinions is given artificially heightened importance solely to obscure the cowardice of the censors.

Update: It’s become a full-on assault on individual liberties, epitomized by the overt attack on our freedom of speech, but plainly won’t be limited to that.

We have Jack Dorsey banning all Trump speech from his Twitter, along with the speech of his supporters. We have Followers “disappearing” from other Conservatives who tweet.

We have Tim Cook openly attacking a rival to Twitter–and to Apple–with his ban of the Parler app from his app store.

We have Sundar Pichai joining the attack by barring the Parler app from his Google Android app store.

We have Jeff Bezos shutting down Parler altogether with his Amazon ban of Parler from his servers that were hosting the alternative to Dorsey’s Twitter. That shutdown, too, was done with advance notice deliberately too for Parler to withdraw its–and its users’–information from those servers.

We have Mark Zuckerberg, in addition to the above, banning #WalkAway from his Facebook, a hashtag that committed the speech crime of encouraging members of the Progressive-Democratic Party to leave Party while showing those disappointed and disaffected other places where their voices could be heard and taken seriously.

This a full-on attack by Big Tech, by a tiny few oligarchs grown too powerful and presuming to dictate to ordinary Americans what speech will be permitted in the public square, moving openly to prevent Conservatives from having any voice at all in the public square.

Diversity

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A brief thought. Joseph Epstein wrote about true diversity, as opposed to the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s ideology of race, sex, et al., diversity before merit in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

In the main, he’s right. I want to add a little, though, to his concluding sentence.

The best way to celebrate diversity, perhaps, is to begin by celebrating diversity of thought.

Number one.

Number two is overtly recognizing the inequality of individual talent, interest, work ethic, plain luck, and a host of other inequalities intrinsic in every man that culminate in unequal outcomes flowing from the utterly necessary equality of opportunity.

That equality of opportunity is at the center of individual liberty, which includes the freedom to speak diversely—out loud and publicly—from that diversity of thought.

That ability to speak freely is a critical part of every man’s right to show the best that there is in him, a right that is truncated by demanding equality of position or of outcome.

Additionally, that demand for equality of position or of outcome insults every one of us by insisting that our best isn’t worthy of consideration or that we cannot achieve that best without Know Betters in government doing for us.

Campus Speech

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Under some pressure and an appellate court ruling in a Speech First suit, the University of Texas has agreed to stop limiting freedom of speech on campus.

…administrators agree to dismantle the bias-response team and amend policies that chill speech. Gone is a ban on “uncivil behaviors and language that interfere” with the “welfare, individuality or safety of other persons.” Also stricken is a definition of “verbal harassment” that prohibited “ridicule” or “personal attacks.”
Under the settlement, UT reserves the right “to devise an alternative” to its bias-response team, but “Speech First is free to challenge that alternative.”

It’s a step, but only a small one, and it’s unfortunate that Speech First agreed to settle. A court ruling would have been much more binding and over a much broader reach of jurisdiction.

Any settlement is only as good as the integrity of the parties to the settlement, and UT (and ISU and UM, two other institutions that have settled speech matters with Speech First) have already demonstrated their level of integrity by having attempted to ban free speech in the first place. The same personnel who assaulted speech, after all, are the signatories to the settlement and are still in place at those institutions. And this settlement promises more UT-provoked expensive litigation as those personnel dream up other ways to try to limit speech.

Along with this, UT’s band continues to refuse to play The Eyes of Texas over what those associated with the band are pleased to call “politically correct” reasons. Those same UT administrators are pretending to review that position.

A Thought on Section 230

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Rick White, Republican Representative from Washington at the end of the last century, had a thought on Section 230—he wants to repair it rather than eliminate it—and so (of course) do I. He began with this:

…some saying it allows big tech companies to censor political views, and others saying it enables the spread of disinformation.

What far too many who should know better miss, though, is that both of these are true; it’s not a matter being mutually exclusive, or even a matter of one or the other.

What those worthies also miss is that only one of them is of any concern at all. Regardless of the bleatings of the Know Betters in the press and in our political elites, ordinary Americans are fully capable of discriminating (uncensored) disinformation from (uncensored) misinformation from (uncensored) information.

One idea that White suggested in lieu of eliminating Section 230 was this, and he was serious about it:

We could also establish a plan for self-regulation by the online industry.

It’s hard to see how White could be so naive or so…misinformed. The online industry isn’t the problem. The small cartel of social media is the problem. And we’re already seeing what Jack Dorsey’s, Mark Zuckerberg’s, and Sundar Pichai’s self-regulation looks like.

Section 230 is beyond repair; the conditions extant when it was written no longer obtain. Pipelines don’t manage the information flowing through them. Publishers do.

The Section needs repeal.

Pocket Veto

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This week, the House passed the National Defense Appropriation Act with enough votes that, if repeated, would override a Presidential veto.

President Donald Trump has said he’ll veto the bill because it doesn’t include repeal of Section 230, which confers immunity from publication-related liability on Facebook, Twitter, Alphabet, and a few others.

Now the bill goes to the Senate for passage, and then to the President.

Here’s the thing, folks. As I write this post, it’s 9 December. Congress recesses at COB 18 December.

If Congress doesn’t extend its session and not go on recess as currently scheduled, the President can simply not sign the bill into law, and it’ll be pocket vetoed with no opportunity for an override vote in each house.

Here’s what Article I, Section 7 of our Constitution has to say on Presidential vetoes [emphasis added]:

If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

We’re already inside those 10 days.