Vice President Kamala Harris stated to Jake Tapper on CNN that social media companies “are immediately speaking to millions and millions of individuals without any amount of supervision or rules and it has to stop.”
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Does it?
Every two-bit conservative has ever defended banning its citizens as a means of preventing propaganda from spreading.
But social media sites, contra the reliably illiberal Harris, are n’t “directly speaking” to anyone. Millions of people are conversing with and speaking with millions of people. Actually, that’s what grinds the present left’s gears: unattended conversations.
Take the Portuguese Supreme Court section, which upheld a justice’s determination to shut down Elon Musk’s X over alleged “misinformation” concerns.
We may believe that the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, who again promised to outlaw weapons through an executive attempt, is in agreement with Justice Alexandre de Moraes ‘ determination to shut down a social media platform because he refused to comply with the government’s requirements for repression.
According to The Associated Press, the Portuguese great prosecutor’s decision “undermines Musk and his followers ‘ efforts to portray Justice Alexandre de Moraes as an authoritarian rogue who is intent on censoring political discourse in Brazil.”
Actually? Since it seems to me that the state’s closing of one of the most well-known social media sites is a clear example of a ban on social speech, regardless of whether one person is to blame or the entire government.
And make no mistake, it is politically inspired. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva argued,” Just because the guy has a lot of money does n’t mean he can disrespect this ( country )”. Also, the South American nation’s constitution, like ours, evidently protects completely expression– making no distinction between the weak and wealthy:” Any and all censorship of a political, ideological, and artistic nature is prohibited”. Because the gun stage appears in Chapter V, Article 220, or website 148 of my translated translation, you can remind Brazil is very concerned about the situation.
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Let’s concede, however, that de Moraes is n’t any kind of renegade, merely a conventional Brazilian autocrat. In the same way, Musk is n’t just another billionaire; he is also a tech CEO who, in general, sees free expression as a neutral principle.
The fact that Brazil forbids Musk’s website and that he allows the far-left Lula to have a 9 million-follower profile on X is the strongest support for this claim, in my opinion, is the strongest support for this claim.
In Europe, completely expression is likewise supposedly protected by the constitution. The right, then, is dependent on “national security,” “territorial problem,”” crime,” “health,” and other extremely malleable factors that ultimately permit police officers in the United Kingdom and Germany to show up at your door and put you in jail for offensive content.
Every Banana Republic has a Bill of Rights, as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once remarked. How near to becoming one is the question.
Uncomfortably close is the answer.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that senior Biden administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor” COVID-19 content, including “humor and satire”, during the pandemic. Zuckerberg vowed to never allow his business to turn around once more. I’m sorry if we do n’t take him at his word.
Tech companies are free to keep or kick off anyone they want from their platforms, as they should, and have unencumbered free association rights. Before Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now known as X, contemporary left-wingers celebrated the independence of social media platforms. ” If you do n’t like it, build your own Twitter”, they would say.
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OK. We have a big problem when corporations, who frequently spend tens of millions annually in Washington on rent-seeking and lobbying for favorable regulations, take marching orders from state officials and enormous federal bureaucracies on the rules of permissible speech.
If candidates for president truly cared about “democracy,” they would be supporting anti-cronyism laws and forbid government officials from influencing or pressuring private entities on their speeches.
But, these days, many Americans no longer view free expression as a neutral, liberal virtue worth defending. Foremost among them, apparently, is the Democratic presidential ticket.
