Posted on 02/07/2022 4:30:48 AM PST by MtnClimber
Online safety used to be focused on preventing actual criminal activity and violence. But when antitrust legislation is used by leftists to create “safe spaces,” we’ve got a problem.
Big Tech censorship is back in the news over the demands that Spotify fire Joe Rogan for hosting guests who criticize establishment talking points. Everyone from the Biden Administration to Neil Young wants Rogan silenced. If Spotify refuses to get rid of Rogan, the pro-censorship crowd has other ideas about how to get rid of him.
The New York Times’ staff editor Spencer Bokat-Lindell cited the ACLU to argue that the solution to Joe Rogan’s “misinformation” is to use antitrust to prevent a “handful of companies [achieving] the market dominance they have over such important public spaces.”
Unfortunately, many conservatives are now under the mistaken belief that antitrust can be deployed as a solution to Big Tech censorship.
Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee, with the support of five Republicans including Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), advanced the American Choice and Innovation Online Act (ACIOA). The law would require tech companies to allow competitors to have equal access to their platforms. The law is cosponsored by pro-censorship Democrats and is meant to protect online businesses, not individual users. But the bill’s Republican supporters somehow still view it as an answer to tech censorship.
Senator Cruz argues the ACIOA would “provide protections to content providers, to businesses that are discriminated against because of the content they produce.” He undoubtedly means free speech apps such as Rumble, GETTR, and Parler, which either have been censored or forced to censor their own users due to the Apple and Google Play rules. Many on the Left oppose the bill for the same reason.
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
The censorship advocates are not going to give up.
No, but busting up Big Tech will create much more competition in the market. Having far more smaller companies will make it much more difficult to impose censorship that actually succeeds in suppressing a message from reaching wider audiences like the Big Tech monopolies acting as a cartel managed to do in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election. Additionally that would make it far more difficult to collude to destroy a competitor like Parler or to deplatform someone the tech oligarchy doesn’t like such as Alex Jones, Tommy Robinson, Donald Trump, etc.
Not only would such censorship and anti competitive practices be much harder to achieve but with a robust market, those who chose to censor would simply strengthen competitors. Another benefit is that the in kind campaign contributions the Big Tech monopolies make to Democrats by silencing their ideological opponents would be greatly reduced.
For a variety of reasons, Big Tech must be broken up and destroyed.
Treat them like phone companies, available to all users. They are service providers, not arbiters.
Thats how they used to operate until they asserted censorship powers.
Good anti-trust legislation creates private rights of lawsuits,profit forfeiture for repeat offenders, etc.which this does. It is merely a resolution at this point. It is subject to debated and amendment.
Safety is not an exclusion. It is an affirmative defense, which means you have to prove it and you have to show particularized facts that the particular statement violates privacy rights or undermines public safety. This would not defeat a pattern of practice of banning a particular poster or a particular class of political ideas.
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