The Contempt of the Left

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden says it’s time to start censoring private enterprise eliminate protections for tech platforms that publish user posts [emphasis added].

“Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one,” Biden said in the interview, which was published on Friday.
The law, which was enacted in 1996 as part of the Communications Decency Act, gives websites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter broad legal immunity—essentially, it eliminates the possibility of legal consequences over what their users post. The statute was created to protect free speech on the internet.

Biden went further:

…we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy[.]

This is just more of Progressive-Democrats “be like Europe” sewage.

Biden did more:

[The Times] can’t write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But [Zuckerberg] can….

This…foolishness…is a deliberately false analogy. Facebook isn’t originating content like [The Times] does. A more honest, albeit equally loose, analogy would be to liken Facebook to the distributor of editions of [The Times].  Maybe Biden wants newsstands, or the neighborhood paperboy, censored as responsible for [The Times]’s content.

It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false….

This is yet another example of the utter contempt in which Progressive-Democrats hold us average Americans. We’re just too grindingly stupid, Biden and his fellows insist, to discriminate for ourselves among the false, the erroneous, the satire, the foolish, the uncomfortably true, the simply true, etc. Our Know Betters have to do that for us.

There’s much over which to criticize Facebook, but government censoring free speech isn’t on that list.

Score One for Facebook

Facebook had a post up, recently, that the government of Singapore didn’t like and of which that government disputed the truthfulness.

As a result, By Order Of the Singapore government, Facebook added a notice—a “label”—to the post:

Facebook is legally required to tell you that the Singapore government says this post has false information.

For a wonder, Facebook didn’t take the post down, nor did it make any effort to “correct” its content.  Instead, it posted the notice, letting readers decide for themselves…whether they should take seriously the post or the notice required by a mendacious government.

Of course, I am assuming a motive for Facebook’s action.

A Thought on Censorship

Stanley Fish, Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law, thinks that when Seton Hall “disinvited” him from speaking there he wasn’t being censored.

Fish’s headline, I Wasn’t Censored When I Was Disinvited, led off his claim. Then he contradicted himself with the opening sentence of his second paragraph:

My ideas were judged unworthy of being heard.

This is precisely what censorship is. Here is a legal definition of censorship:

The suppression or proscription of speech or writing that is deemed obscene, indecent, or unduly controversial.

Here’s a “civilian” definition of censor:

To examine and expurgate.

Near the end of his piece, Fish had this:

I have no right to speak at Seton Hall….

That’s a strawman argument. No one claiming he had a right to speak or that such a right was being blocked.  Moreover, there’s nothing in either of those definitions about blocking a right to speak; censorship in the Seton Hall case was the blocking of speech itself, and the censors were precisely those managers of the school and the school’s pupils.

This is an example of how far left the Left has pushed what is permissible speech and how meekly folks who should know better have acquiesced in that push.

Free Speech vs No Free Speech

The Progressive-Democratic Party vs the Republican Party.

Progressive-Democratic Party icon—and proud progressive—Hillary Clinton wants to ban free speech, and the first step is Twitter’s Jack Dorsey’s ban on the free speech of political advertising, done with her wholehearted and full throated support.

Twitter made the right decision to say, “Look, we don’t want to get into the judging game.” I think that should be the decision that Facebook makes as well.

Never mind that banning political ads—a form of the speech explicitly protected under the 1st Amendment—is a most fundamental bit of judging speech.  Note that Clinton desire to extend the ban to Facebook:

If you were to say to your expert engineers, our algorithms really favor the explosive, the inflammatory, the blatantly false, and we love to hook people into them and they seek more of it and then they get absolutely barraged by all of this information, we need to tweak the algorithms[.]

Never mind whose judgment—not that of us average Americans, whose judgment plainly is inadequate, we being merely a gang of deplorables—would be used to make those definitions of falseness; never mind whose judgment—certainly not our own—would be used to determine the badness of “inflammatory” or “explosive.” This is a move to protect the established, the elite, the Know Betters.

On the other hand, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) objected to such limits on free speech.  He objected, as paraphrased by Fox News,

the new Twitter policy as an effort to undermine the First Amendment right to free speech.

He went on: the ban on political advertising—on a form of political speech—would

just amplify the already privileged speakers who already possess multimillion-dollar platforms. It would just help clear the field for those elites by denying the same tools to fledgling speakers who are not already famous.
[It does] not bolster our democracy. It would degrade democracy. It would amplify the advantage of media companies, celebrities, and certain other established elites while denying an important tool to the Americans who disagree with them[.]

There’s that judgment bit again, and how it would work were the Progressive-Democrats’ attack on our speech successful.  Of course Dorsey, Clinton, and Party leadership know this full well—they’re just after protecting their narrative and their positions atop the political pantheon.

And, with Dorsey’s established practice of censoring Conservative speech in general, a more insidiously subtle effort to expand that censorship.

Remember this next fall.

Love Me that Censorship

That’s what that icon of the Left, Juan Williams, says.

The reality is that [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to understand, from my perspective, that he’s undermining his brand by allowing political lies to be put on his platform. That, to me, lessens the trust that the consumer has.

Because censoring speech—especially politically speech—is the way to win the hearts and minds and trust of the consumer.

Certainly, controlling speech and allowing only that which the Left approves—what Juan Williams personally approves—can be a tool for winning controlling the hearts and minds of citizens, but trust? No. Censorship destroys trust.

But, hey—the Left doesn’t approve.  Juan Williams doesn’t approve.  That makes it all OK.

Williams had this gem, too, accusing folks who disagree with him on this—Conservatives—of flip flopping:

I remember when the right was always on Facebook, “Oh, you’re trying to silence…conservatives.”  Now it’s like, “Oh, yeah, put Trump’s lies there, please.”

Because objecting to censorship is flip floppery.  And that last bit: the Right Reverend Juan Williams is the arbiter of lies, distortions, and facts because us ordinary Americans are just too grindingly stupid to make the discriminations for ourselves.

This is another example of the Left’s—the Progressives’—utter contempt for those who don’t agree with them.