Posted on 01/22/2023 12:06:08 PM PST by ransomnote
[H/T grey_whiskers]
https://twitter.com/PTRUMPFORTX2020/status/1616582422287769601
FR conservatives do a pretty good job handling shills.
Fat checkers. lol. apt.
Are you paying attention to this one Semimojo? This is more proof of why you cannot *ALLOW* companies to censor.
I disagree. I believe they are violating the 1rst amendment, and are therefore committing an illegal act. So far as i'm concerned, the 1rst amendment applies to all carriers of mass communications.
Now I realize others do not agree with me, but I believe that over time people will come to realize that we cannot allow communications companies to censor people.
Nope. Congress Shall Make No Law. FB ain’t Congress. Nobody cares about your concern. Out here in reality communication companies are not congress. If people want the 1st to apply to communication companies that’s a fine example of why we’re not a democracy, cause crap like that is how you vote for tyranny.
Jim and the admins here routinely censor freepers and freeper comments.
Do you think that is wrong?
I've never seen an FR post censored for conveying factual information or for countering an official agenda item.
I have seen potty mouthed posts and abbusive troll posts zotted. Not the same thing as letting government and big Pharma stooges come in and do the censoring.
Who are they going to be in trouble with?
Facebook is under no obligation to print the truth. They can say whatever they want. They can delete whatever they want. They have an obligation to their shareholders. Period.
The “outrage” over Twitter and Facebook is, essentially, outrage over discovering you are stupid.
Wow. In other threads I always thought you were well read and a good debater. But to imagine that any company has a first amendment obligation is so basically incorrect that I am stunned to see you write that.
“...conveying factual information...”
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And therein lies the rub.
What “they” consider to be factual differs from yours and mine.
Doing what we are doing now is how we have been constantly moving towards tyranny.
The intent of the framers was to prevent censorship. Governments have now learned an end run around the framers intent by coercing private corporations who handle communications into doing government censorship for them.
I very greatly doubt you have given the topic the degree of thought that I have given it, and what I see is fascism and tyranny coming if we don't stop this.
But I don't expect to persuade you. I am just pointing out what I now consider obvious and hopefully others will weigh what I say and grasp the essential point.
Free Republic is a small club with a membership that has to be approved by the owners. It is stated forthrightly that it is a place for conservative commentary. It is also relatively small by the standards of facebook or twitter or tik tok or google, etc.
Free Republic is not a public forum and does not advertise itself as a public forum.
Facebook has over a billion users and it has a significant impact in the everyday lives of Americans. It *IS* a large scale communications company, like the telephone company.
We didn't tolerate the phone company shutting off service for clients who expressed opinions the phone company didn't like, and so we should not tolerate such behavior for any other communications company.
“...Facebook has a significant impact in the everyday lives of Americans...”
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Not this American.
Your mileage may vary.
I have given it much thought, and I do not make such a claim lightly.
It is "basically incorrect" insofar as we have always been told the 1rst amendment applies only to government. We do not have to accept what we are told, especially when we have a very powerful interest in refusing to accept what we are told.
Can we agree that the intent of the framers was to prevent censorship of the public?
Can we agree that at the time, the only entity which would have been thought capable of censoring the public was the government?
The framers saw the threat of government censorship as dangerous to the Republic, and they therefore forebade it.
If government censorship is dangerous, is not the same thing true of any censorship that is the equivalent in scope to government censorship?
And now experience has shown us that *IF* private entities are permitted to censor opinions the government(S) don't like, (more than one government is currently doing this) then that government can simply apply pressure to the "private entity" and coerce it into censoring whatever the government wants censored.
It *IS* government censorship through proxy.
Google routinely censors whatever the Chinese government demands, not just there, but over here too. And now we have the German governments telling these big tech companies to censor this and that, and so too do we have other countries in Europe doing this.
If you allow private corporations to censor American speech, you have effectively given every nation in the world veto power over anything Americans say. All any nation has to do is threaten the interests of these corporations in their countries, and they can curtail American speech over here.
As for the legal end of it. People are too caught up in black letter law and not sufficiently comprehensive of the intent and purpose for which the law was created. People can interpret the words to mean something not intended.
In this case, we have people strictly reading the words of the 1rst amendment to mean something the founders would not have agreed to tolerate, which is Censorship of the American people.
To interpret the 1rst amendment into allowing censorship, you have rendered it effectively repealed. It serves no purpose if governments can censor by proxy, because whomever has control of American communications can always be arm twisted by the government, usually covertly.
And lastly I want to talk about the sheer danger of allowing things to continue as they are. This thread's headline should give you an idea of one aspect of that. Many of us believe we have been misled and lied to about the "vaccines." (experimental gene therapy) We believe we have been lied to about it's effectiveness in preventing COVID 19, and about the potential dangers of it's side effects.
This censorship by Facebook at the behest of the "vaccine" companies may have caused the deaths of thousands of people. And do not think for a moment that the government isn't connected into the middle of this whole thing.
What I see is this. If we do not stop this censorship business, we will see the fascism problem in this nation get worse.
If all the other Americans were like you, we would have a much more sensible country. Alas, it is not to be, and Facebook has a significant impact on less sensible people who also vote and thereby control the destiny of our nation.
In trouble?
With who?
“What we’re doing now” is constantly asking the government to fix problems. Which is what you want to do. I’ve put plenty of thought into it. That’s how I know your path is wrong.
“I’ve never seen an FR post censored for conveying factual information or for countering an official agenda item.”
Just because you don’t see the tree in the Forrest fall doesn’t mean it didn’t fall.
“I have seen potty mouthed posts and abbusive troll posts zotted.”
And you know that a lot of them don’t get zotted.
I saw him fall from grace with that gambling addition of his.
I am perfectly willing to read anything you have to say on the issue of monopoly power and how the people can overcome it short of government action.
Tell me why Teddy Roosevelt and the Sherman anti-trust act were wrong.
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