Tag Archives: free speech

Internet Censorship

Posted on by
Reply

The Supreme Court has granted certiori to a suit involving Texas and Florida statutes barring social media from committing censorship.

The Texas law prohibited social-media platforms with at least 50 million monthly active users to censor users based on their viewpoints, thus applying to the most popular sites including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, as well as X. The Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals, in New Orleans, upheld the measure.
Similar Florida legislation…was largely found unlawful by the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit.

Thus, a circuit split, which virtually guaranteed a Supreme Court case. Plaintiffs argue for allowing these media to commit censorship as they see fit. Chris Marchese, NetChoice‘s Litigation Center Director:

Online services have a well-established First Amendment right to host, curate and share content as they see fit.

In most cases, that’s true. However, online services that have enthusiastically presented themselves as public squares (vis. Twitter/X) or that have become de facto public squares (vis. Facebook), must act like the public squares that they are, and cannot censor speech made there.

Marchese, though, contradicts his own claim:

The internet is a vital platform for free expression, and it must remain free from government censorship.

You bet. The public squares on the Internet also must remain free from censorship. (State) governments barring these entities from censoring are not themselves engaged in censorship.

What He Said

Posted on by
Reply

The subheadline on Columbia Law’s School Maurice & Hilda Friedman Professor of Law Philip Hamburger’s Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed is spot on.

The First Amendment protects the right to hear alternative views, not merely to express them.

Hamburger went on:

People can’t develop their views with any sophistication unless they can consider opinions that enlarge, refine, moderate, or challenge their own. So, when government demands the suppression of some speech and chills even more, it reduces the diversity, value, and moderation of opinion—and thereby diminishes the opportunity for every individual to develop and express his own considered views. Censorship inhibits the output of critical voices, which lessens Americans’ intellectual input, which in turn limits their intellectual output. Reading and speaking are inextricably linked in conversation.

If we’re blocked from hearing another’s speech, however uncomfortable it might be to us, neither we nor the speaker have free speech.

Yet that’s the goal of the Biden administration: pressure speech outlets, especially social media platforms, to erase and to block future attempts to publish unpopular speech, speech the Biden administration personages cynically euphemize as “misinformation, disinformation, malinformation.” Never mind that those terms are defined by those same Leftist cronies in the administration.

Never mind, either, that the optimal response to misinformation, disinformation, malinformation—however defined—is with speech the hearer, or better, the listener—considers to better address the question than that objected-to speech. Simply suppressing objected-to speech isn’t mere laziness; it ranges from cowardice to naked power grabbing.

What Hamburger said, indeed.

Fundamentally Transforming America

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve written elsewhere of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s goal, and of the destructive nature of that goal.

Here is the rank and file of the Progressive-Democratic Party, demonstrating how deep-seated is that desire to destroy our Republic:

  • nearly half of Democrats (47%) support censorship, and think speech should be legal “only under certain ­circumstances”
  • one-third of Democrats (34%) think Americans have “too much freedom”
  • 75% think government has a responsibility to censor “hateful” social media posts
  • a majority of Democrats (52%) approve of the government censoring social media posts “under the rubric of protecting national security”

It isn’t possible to fundamentally transform something without first destroying it so that the transformation can be done from the ground up. This assault is on that path if we choose wrongly in the fall of 2024.

ByteDance and TikTok

Posted on by
Reply

Recall that TikTok, a social medium heavily favored by our children, is wholly owned by ByteDance. Recall further, that ByteDance is domiciled inside the Peoples Republic of China. Finally, recall that the PRC’s 2017 national security law requires every PRC-domiciled company to collect and deliver to that nation’s intelligence community any information that community requests. A bonus memory: TikTok’s executive team has been at pains to insist that, in the United States, they operate independently of all of that.

Against that backdrop, there’s this:

Since the start of the year, a string of high-level executives have transferred from ByteDance to TikTok, taking on some of the top jobs in the popular video-sharing app’s moneymaking operations. Some moved to the US from ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters.

That’s not independence. Nor does it matter what top jobs, in particular, ByteDance’s transferred executives assume in TikTok. They work for ByteDance, which operates at the behest of the PRC government. Their presence at the top of TikTok only tightens that control.

Bottom line: it doesn’t matter how much gussying up ByteDance or TikTok executives do in their attempts to deny Peoples Republic of China control of TikTok; the PRC’s intelligence community can command TikTok to obtain and deliver any information regarding TikTok’s users that the intel community wants.

It’s past time the Federal government bans TikTok from any and all operations inside the US. Standing in the way of that are too many Congressmen and Senators, of both parties, who have taken “donations” from folks like Jeff Yass, who through his Susquehanna International Group owns a big stake in ByteDance, [and he] has also worked to fend off a US ban through organizations like Club for Growth. Among those…donees…are

  • Senator Rand Paul (R, KY), who received through a Paul-supporting PAC, $3 million
  • Congressman Thomas Massie (R, KY), who has received $32,200 directly from Yass, his wife, and via a Massie-supporting PAC
  • Other [carefully unnamed] Republicans in Congress, including at least five others besides Paul and Massie, who received financial support from Club for Growth and have objected to legislation targeting TikTok.

Yass has rationalized his antipathy to banning TikTok with this:

TikTok is about free speech and innovation, the epitome of libertarian and free market ideals. The idea of banning TikTok is an anathema to everything I believe.

Aside from moving to protect his investment in the PRC-controlled ByteDance, it appears that part of everything I believe includes the right of the Peoples Republic of China to spy on our children. Banning TikTok has nothing to do with interfering with free speech (or innovation, come to that). Banning TikTok would ban a tool used by the PRC against our children and our national security, to the extent it’s used by government officials at any level of our hierarchy or by business executives anywhere. Content, speech, all of that, could and would continue apace, completely unhindered, on any of the plethora of other social medium platforms.

Ban TikTok. No further delays.

A Bogus Beef

Posted on by
Reply

Some academics object to Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott moving to ban TikTok from Texas government devices and from personal devices used to conduct Texas official business. Texas’ legislature passed the bill creating the ban, and Abbott signed it into law last December. Now a New York State-headquartered organization, ironically named The Knight First Amendment Institute, which is a facility of New York City’s Columbia University, is suing Abbott among other governors, over the ban, claiming free speech violations.

The lawsuit said the state’s decision…is comprising teaching and research. And more specifically, it said it was “seriously impeding” faculty pursuing research into the app—including research that could illuminate or counter concerns about TikTok.

This is, to use the legalese technical term, a crock. It’s also, to use a legal technical term, a frivolous suit.

Banning TikTok in no way inhibits what these academics say or collaborate over, nor does it in any way impede those academics’ speech or collaboration; it only bans one tool, a national security risk, from being used for the speech/collaboration. There are, after all, a plethora of communication and collaboration devices available other than TikTok. To name just a few (located after 10 grueling seconds on Bing search):

  • Slack
  • Zoom
  • Miro
  • MindMeister
  • Loom
  • Asana
  • Notion
  • Microsoft Teams

There are, also, freeware tools like Hugo and Scribe.

It’s hard to believe these So Smart persons aren’t aware of these tools. Maybe they should listen more to the students in their freshman orientation courses.

It’s even harder to understand why these Precious Ones insist on leaving their personal information; their research ideas, techniques, and progresses; their speech and thought available for People’s Republic of China government personnel to freely exploit; they should be called to explain that.

Their free speech interference claim is especially pernicious, given that these august personages are of the same guild that so zealously blocks, even with violence and firings, the speech of those with whom they disagree.