Tag Archives: free speech

Speech and Private Enterprise

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Some companies are reaching the conclusion that it’s become necessary to pull advertising from Facebook over the latter’s mishandling of speech, if in many cases they’re misapprehending the types of speech being abused.

The WSJ article at the link led off with this:

Facebook Inc said it would start labeling political speech that violates its rules and take other measures to prevent voter suppression and protect minorities from abuse.

Pick one. Suppressing political speech is suppressing voters.

Furthermore, Zuckerberg is hardly in a position to define “abuse;” his censorship is itself abuse.

There’s also this from a commenter in the article’s comment thread, which illustrates the breadth of the misunderstanding regarding free speech obligations:

Facebook is a private company, and platform. It can do as it pleases so long as you sign off on their terms and conditions agreement….

As a legal matter, sure. However, the principle underlying the injunction against Government abridging the freedom of speech is universal and applies to everyone. Zuckerberg knows this full well, and he knows further from that that he has a moral obligation to actively support free speech as well as to passively not abridge it.

His obligation is expanded by the size and control over political—and other—speech his Facebook has achieved and exercises.

Manipulated Media

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It seems that Carpe Donktum, a President Donald Trump supporter, put together a satirical video.

The video…begins with dramatic music showing a black toddler running away from a white toddler with a “breaking news” graphic that reads “Terrified toddler runs away from racist baby” with the CNN logo next to it. That headline then changed to “Racist baby probably a Trump supporter.”
Then, a graphic that shows “what actually happened” shows the two toddlers running towards each other and hugging with excitement to the tune the “Close to You” cover by Harry Connick Jr.
“America is not the problem… fake news is,” the video tells viewers. “If you see something, say something. Only you can prevent fake news dumpster fires.”

Never mind that

The footage came from a viral Facebook video shared in 2019 featuring real-life New York pals Maxwell and Finnegan, who were 26 and 27 months old respectively at the time.

Never mind that Jack Dorsey and his censoring Twitter twitterers know this full well.

Never mind that anyone with two neurons to bump together into a ganglion could recognize the video as satire. However, @Jack and his Twitter censors insist on insulting tens of millions of Americans by slapping their “Manipulated Media” flag on it after Trump pinned it in his Twitter feed.

Satire isn’t manipulated media. @jack, with his decision to censor a satirical posting, is manipulating media.

Some Speech Rights are More Equal than Others

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A college newspaper, following in the footsteps of the tabloid New York Times, has fired a columnist for not complying with the paper’s, or its University’s, thoughtcrime avoidance requirements.

Syracuse University student Adrianna San Marco was fired from her gig as a columnist at a local paper, The Daily Orange, when she dismissed the notion of “institutional racism” in an opinion piece for a separate, conservative website.

And she wasn’t even writing for the ex-employing paper; her piece was published by LifeZette. Here’s Daily Orange Editor-in-Chief Casey Darnell:

We aren’t afraid of controversial views, but we have a responsibility to avoid promoting harmful ones. We don’t censor conservative columnists[.]

Not afraid? Yet he and his organization censored speech. If he doesn’t understand that, his journalism professors have failed him badly. If he doesn’t understand that suppressing speech is precisely the promotion of harm then Syracuse has failed him badly. His parents should demand their money back.

Syracuse University did not respond to a request for comment.

Of course not.

Free Speech for Me

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…but not for thee.

‘Course, we’re all perfectly free to speak approved messages. This is demonstrated by Facebook’s overt, deliberate censorship of a political ad. Days after Mark Zuckerberg so piously said his company would not censor political ads (even though he considered all other speech of which he disapproved freely censorable), he had his Facebook pull a Trump campaign ad because he didn’t like what it said.

The ad in alleged question was a call-out of the dangers of far-left radical organizations, including antifa. The ad used one of antifa’s several symbols as part of the call-out, but Zuckerberg decided that even using the symbol to symbolize hate groups was too “triggering.”

Not only is Zuckerberg committing censorship—and illustrating one of the points of the campaign ad—he’s insulting ordinary Americans, insisting we’re all too stupid to evaluate speech on our own: we have to be instructed by our Leftist betters.

A carefully anonymous Facebook spokesman had this:

We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate…. Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.

The only hate in this incident is Zuckerberg’s and his Facebook’s organized contempt for Americans, claiming as this Anonymous One does, that ordinary Americans are too stupid to understand the plain context of a political ad taken in its entirety.