-
Whoa. I just located a person making the same case I did,bringing up the same rhetorical points, but in a less conversational, nanashi-is-supposed-to-be-writing-a-work-email-but-let's-brainstorm-ideas-about-the-legalities-and-political-realities-and-economic-and-social-realities-of-this-issue-instead way and in a more professional one:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...y-free-speech/
"The right wants a hands-off approach to business. Until it hates the results.
Republican policy ideas paved the way for private companies ditching Trump and his supporters.
Years of Republican rhetoric and policy priorities, leaning heavily on the notion that the free market can determine almost everything, paved the way for this moment: The GOP worked for ages to ensure that companies could decide what was best for them. Call it cancel culture, or call it the free market reacting, well, freely to events."
While I was working as an aide to small-government supply-sider Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) in the 1970s, it took years for me to get the Wall Street Journal’s tax reporter to write about Kemp’s tax legislation, even after the paper’s conservative editorial page had endorsed it. (Later, I would come to question tax-cut orthodoxy.) My colleagues and I bemoaned liberal bias among journalists, but we never believed the media owed us anything or that our free speech was being squelched. We were conservatives: We believed that competition would sort out which ideas would see the light of day. The media referee wasn’t government; it was the news consumer.
The Republican argument, which eventually gained traction with readers and viewers, held that private enterprise knew what was best and should be left to its own devices. Executives and their allies in elective office advanced climate change skepticism in the service of environmental deregulation; during George W. Bush’s presidency, they advocated partial privatization of Social Security; they defended the right of bake shops to decline customers ordering same-sex wedding cakes; they argued successfully on behalf of companies like Hobby Lobby declining to pay for employees’ contraceptive care under Obamacare; they battled the nebulous foe of “political correctness,” labeling those on the left as “snowflakes” for favoring, in their view, restrictions, not freedom, in the domain of political speech.
These demands for liberty were always partial — often philosophically inconsistent. Antiabortion arguments often disguise a powerful role for government in regulating women’s bodies; restricting illegal immigration necessarily implicates government prohibition on hiring undocumented employees; in the Trump era, efforts to punish China for its trade policies led many on the right to endorse tariffs and quotas that raise prices and inhibit consumer choice — an approach long considered anti-free market. Similarly, conservatives who once championed abolition of the Fairness Doctrine now seem to wish for some sort of government intervention to force social media platforms to look the other way when voices on the right post baseless conspiracy theories, dangerously incorrect health data or even foment violence on their platforms.
Many voices on the right seem to have abandoned the idea that the marketplace can be trusted to sort itself out. In response to the de-platforming of Parler, podcaster Buck Sexton decried “big tech censorship,” missing the irony that Parler, a private entity, was effectively shut down by other private entities — and that Sexton retained a platform to issue his critique of “big tech” via Twitter.
It’s not clear if it has occurred to him, and others, what should be obvious: The First Amendment protects private speech from government censorship, but not from de-platforming by a private concern. Or that Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, or a publisher’s decision to cancel publication of Hawley’s book, are expressions of corporate values that reflect market forces. Some argue that Twitter is more like a public utility than a private outlet — and therefore shouldn’t censor certain voices — but that view runs counter to how conservatives have framed the role of private enterprise: Twitter isn’t the phone company; it’s the Christian-owned bakery, or Hobby Lobby.
If Twitter were required to allow Trump to remain on its platform, even if it concludes that he has serially violated its terms of service — if private companies were required to host Parler, even after determining that anti-democratic rhetoric proliferated on its platform — that wouldn’t be a win for the First Amendment or the marketplace of ideas. It would be a top-down mandate that private concerns are required to tolerate, and indirectly participate in, the dissemination of misinformation and of lawlessness, imposed by an arbitrary standard of fairness.
The idea of repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a provision that Trump and his acolytes — such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — have repeatedly railed against, could very well lead to increased scrutiny of right-wingers on the Internet. Now, under the law, social media companies aren’t treated as traditional publishers, thus they are offered protection from lawsuits related to content posted by their users and leeway to make “good faith” efforts at restricting content they deem obscene, violent or harassing. Removing Section 230 could increase the chances that these companies would be exposed to greater liability, potentially motivating them to more tightly restrict content that defames, incites or otherwise violates laws that apply to traditional media such as newspapers.
Reacting to Twitter’s banning his father, Donald Trump Jr. claimed — on Twitter — that “Free-speech no longer exists in America.” It’s a signal that conservative notions of the role of private companies, and government, have become untethered from supposedly conservative politics. Republicans once fought for the proposition that government shouldn’t dictate what messages were and weren’t acceptable. Now, their pleading is almost like a call for a new Fairness Doctrine, seeking some mechanism to require social media and Internet hosts to give equal time to their message.(...)"
Last edited by nanashi; 02-09-2021 at 07:22 PM.
Posting Permissions
- You may not post new threads
- You may not post replies
- You may not post attachments
- You may not edit your posts
-
Forum Rules