Posted on 01/16/2021 3:57:09 AM PST by karpov
The punitive banishment of Donald Trump from Facebook and Twitter has met with almost uniform approval from the president’s critics. So has the decision by Apple and Google to remove Parler, a Twitter alternative favored by Mr. Trump’s supporters, from their app stores. Many Democrats see these actions as a righteous and justified silencing, especially in light of Mr. Trump’s encouraging words for the mob that violently invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6. Even many of Mr. Trump’s supporters concede that Twitter and Facebook owe him no platform—that only the government has a legal obligation to respect the First Amendment.
Richard Epstein takes a different view. The gagging of the president by America’s digital behemoths provokes in him a mix of indignation and distress. A professor at the New York University Law School, he is the foremost libertarian legal scholar in the common-law world. (Mr. Epstein, 77, directs NYU’s Classical Liberal Institute, where I am a fellow.) We converse by Zoom, and he says that he’d tell Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg of Twitter and Facebook, respectively, to “give Trump his account back.”
Mr. Epstein envisions the two CEOs as a captive audience: “I’d say to them, ‘Boys, you’ve got to lighten up. You have to be less confident that you know the truth about everything. You know you’re doing your job when you publish stuff on your site that you strongly disagree with, and not in winning the short-term battle of keeping this, that, or the other guy out.”
Mr. Epstein describes Mr. Dorsey’s Jan. 13 Twitter thread, in which the CEO purports to explain the ban on Mr. Trump, as displaying “a rare combination of hubris and ignorance, proof of how dangerous it is to have a committed partisan as an ostensible umpire.”
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Back fifteen years ago, I don’t think Facebook, Google, or Twitter really had a grasp of where their toys were going take them.
Looking over how they were used in the Middle East in 2010/2011/2012...and Russia in 2012/2013, they probably started to realize that these were propaganda mechanisms more than anything else.
The genie is out of the bottle, and people are staring at the future...wondering just how far the mess will extend to.
Just to suggest today some anti-NBA or anti-NFL slant....you’d probably have a suspension or be cancelled out.
Paywall...nope
I posted a link to the full article.
Great idea.
Thanks.
L
+1
“Epstein had 2 recommendations for Facebook and Twitter, which he is sure they won’t follow.”
Jist of the article.
How about
“No Representation Without Taxation”
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