Tag Archives: free speech

A Bogus Beef

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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.

Misguided

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A Federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction (meaning the matter must still go through the courts before anything becomes final) barring the Federal government from communicating with social-media companies with a view to influencing what those companies post or allow to be posted on their sites.

Some on the Left are objecting.

Some legal scholars have been skeptical that…courts could intervene without chilling legitimate government speech about controversial matters of public interest.

“Some legal scholars” are cynically distorting the situation. There is nothing in the judge’s ruling that bars government speech about controversial matters of public interest. The “government”—i.e., the men and women in government—remains entirely free to speak on any matters it wishes, and in any venue it wishes. The “government,” however, may not seek to tell—or even to try to influence—private enterprises what they might post or not post, or allow or not allow to be posted, on their sites.

The government has a plethora of outlets of its own: the White House, for instance, the Senate, and the House all have their own Web sites, as do each of the several Federal Departments and agencies, and every Congressman in the Congress. And many of those Congressmen hold aperiodic town halls to talk directly with their constituents—all of them should, and those meetings should occur more frequently—but that’s the Congressmen’s choice. Nothing bars any Congressman from doing any of those direct-to-constituents conversations as often as a Congressman might wish.

Furthermore, the judge noted in his injunction that

The Court finds…that a preliminary injunction here would not prohibit government speech.

And

A government entity has the right to speak for itself and is entitled to say what it wishes and express the views it wishes to express. The Free Speech Clause restricts government regulation of private speech; it does not regulate government speech.

At bottom, and especially in light of that last—and the plethora of legitimate government outlets for its own speech—the answer to speech with which government disagrees is not to bar the speech (outside of deliberate and overt incitement to riot), but to answer it with their own speech.

The judge’s preliminary injunction ruling can be read here.

Free Speech Progressive-Democrat Style

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Progressive-Democratic Party members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and its subcommittees—Congressmen Frank Pallone (D, NJ), Jan Schakowsky (D, IL), Doris Matsui (D, CA), and Kathy Castor (D, FL)—are unhappy with the new free speech position of Sundar Pichai’s Google-owned YouTube. They categorically reject YouTube‘s statement that

open debate on political ideas, “even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions, is core to a functioning democratic society—especially in the midst of election season.”

They’re perfectly fine, though, with Pichai’s YouTube censoring the speech of President Joe Biden’s (D) presidential primary campaign opponent, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, and leaving Biden an unanswered and unanswerable field for his own speech.

The Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, it seems, want to be the sole arbiters of what speech is legitimate, and what speech must be banned. These Leftist politicians think we ordinary Americans are just too grindingly stupid to understand what we hear and how to evaluate it, and so we must not be allowed the choice. We must be led by these Leftist politicians.

This is the naked censorship toward which we can look if the Progressive-Democratic Party wins in 2024.

Joe Biden and the Press

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Simon Ateba is a Cameroonian journalist representing Today News Africa in the White House Press Corps. During the daily mid-day-ish press briefings, President Joe Biden’s (D) Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre routinely clashes with him, essentially telling him to shut up and sit down when she’s not ignoring him altogether.

Then came last Monday’s live stream of the day’s presser—and a lively exchange between Ateba and Jeanne-Pierre was excised from the stream. Completely stripped out. Censored.

The deleted portion was restored only after Fox News Digital asked the press secretary’s office how that worked.  “The White House” claimed the deletion was caused by a technical glitch. Apparently, no one in Jean-Pierre’s office monitors the feed to ensure a livestream upload goes smoothly. Or at least that’s the implication from the claim, since surely any such glitch would have been corrected in real time, had anyone been paying attention.

Former President Donald Trump (R) didn’t even treat CNN‘s deliberately combative, constantly interrupting Jim Acosta so shabbily, for all that he so frequently argued with Acosta.

Again I ask: of what is Biden so terrified that he won’t even let his Press Secretary engage with a journalist like Ateba?

More Political Censorship

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Alphabet‘s CEO Sundar Pichai strikes again. Alphabet wholly owns Google (of which Pichai also is CEO), and Google wholly owns YouTube.

Pichai has just engaged—again—in political censorship:

Social media giant YouTube took down an interview of Democrat presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, Jr, claiming that chemicals in the water are turning kids transgender.

What makes this especially insidious is that Kennedy is a political candidate for the Progressive-Democratic Party’s nomination for President. Pichai is actively putting his thumb on the scale in an American election by censoring one of the candidates. His excuse for this, through his carefully anonymous Google spokesperson, is this:

YouTube “removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube‘s general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities.”

Therein lies an additional act of censorship: no one is allowed to question vaccines (which is not what Kennedy was talking about with his allegations of those chemicals, anyway); the science is settled, Damn it!

Pichai objects to open debate and to the correction of false, mis-, or erroneous information by the provision of other information via free discussion and debate. His behavior provides yet another reason to heavily modify, or remove entirely, social media’s Section 230 protections. Social media has gotten too big, become too central to our nation’s public square, to be allowed to continue to abuse that protection.