Posted on 08/16/2018 12:52:24 PM PDT by detective
If you are going to make arguments about this stuff, you need to first check for the facts of each case.
I am not attempting to argue specifics, I am arguing general principles. I made no claims about the two examples you mentioned. I am simply aware that there are purges going on in Big Tech of conservative commenters, and to me the names and specifics are irrelevant.
As a matter of principle, significant public forums should not be permitted to do this for non illegal speech.
I think the facts are relevant. These other activists are not like Jones at all. They are purely philosophical, e.g. pointing out the problems with allows millions of Muslims into Europe. And this case doesn’t appear to be censorship.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3679727/posts?page=64#64
Yes.
Via Twitter isn't the only way to speak.
Gatestone is still alive and well on Twitter. No gradient descent or slippery slope there. Also the Iranian activist supposedly booted from Twitter is still there too although there is a warning message, not censorship.
Censorship is not all or nothing because standards exist. If you want the government to force Twitter to publish all porn (legal porn) other than illegal child porn and “obscenity” (legally defined), then Twitter will sue the government and probably win. They want their standards and those are what you are calling censorship.
Don’t consider porn a free speech issue. The courts are just wrong about that. I consider “speech” to be a free speech issue.
A possible alternative to the requirement to host anything is the public interest standard used by the FCC. That disallows particular profanity and porn for public broadcast: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-profane-broadcasts presumably since any kid could pick up a broadcast (never mind that they get it all from the internet nowadays)
Is there some point in splitting this hair? The salient aspect of this is political speech. Going into the weeds of this “pornography is speech” nonsense is irrelevant to the larger and more essential point that political speech must not be censored by anyone, because it will result in a warping of our system of governance.
I tend to agree that the complete banning of an individual does harm a public forum. But I disagree with you on selective censorship. Those sites will appeal to the courts to protect their ability to uphold their standards and probably win. The sites will argue that law enforcement is too slow and inadequate to stop "true threats" and only they can stop them. That's even fuzzier for incitement where speech is considered to incite the audience to violence. They would claim that right, and the courts would probably back them up.
I think regulation would wind up with a lot of censorship, especially in the form of shadow banning where the controversial content is posted and visible, but doesn't get "recommended" or is otherwise suppressed. The government can't fix that, only competition can. Smashing sites like Facebook into dust for such malfeasance is appealing but difficult to pull off.
Also we still are left with the case of monetized Youtube where poliical speakers expect some income based on numbers of viewers. Aside from the fact that most of the viewership is small (compared to say "stupid cat trick of the day" videos), getting the government involved in payments would be a mess. Thus I would tend to ignore Pamela Geller's complaints about "demonetization".
Not sure what the PragerU link was about. They say that they were reaching 0 out of 3 million followers. I went to my Facebook account (I would rather not have one but I am required to keep one as an officer in a club). I searched for PragerU and clicked on it. I watched a video and became follower number 3,071,153 There were some comments about missing some video but I wasn’t sure how to look for it.
Anti-Hate Speech = Anti-FREE Speech
This must be repeated as often and loud as possible.
The enemies of our Country, ALL enemies of a FREE NATION, are the ones who believes in crushing ‘hate speech’.
If they don’t like what you say, they deem it has ‘Hate’ then proceed to violently and economically silence you.
If so, then perhaps Facebook has reversed itself.
One of the biggest problems of evaluating compaints against Facebook and enforcing them is that it's hard to tell in a typical Facebook page what was posted when. We can't easily figure out if Facebook has "reversed" itself, or just allowed one through, or allowed it just for some followers, etc. What is sorely needed is a way to objectively and accurately track what is accessible and what isn't.
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