By Andrea Widburg, AMERICAN THINKER
Conservatives know that the tech giants, whether social media platforms or search engines, have consistently sought to silence conservative viewpoints. Trump’s more extreme tweets of late were probably intended to goad Twitter into censoring him, and Twitter took the bait on his tweets about mail-in ballots and voter fraud. Once Twitter engaged in overt political censorship, it gave Trump the opening he needed to expose the tech titans to expensive lawsuits and FCC oversight.
It’s no secret that Big Tech, which is located almost exclusively in the uber-leftist Bay Area, leans left. From top management down to the recently hired college graduate, these institutions seek to push a leftist agenda using their power over the flow of almost all information in America. Twitter bans and shadow-bans conservatives, YouTube restricts and demonetizes conservative sites, and Google uses algorithms that force viewpoint discrimination on its searches. Vox has openly admitted that the tech titans plan to use their vast power over information traffic to elect Joe Biden
After Google, via its YouTube subsidiary, demonetized Prager U videos and hid them from searches, Prager U sued both Google and YouTube in a California federal court. The lower court said that Google, as a private business, wasn’t subject to First Amendment limitations, a ruling the 9th Circuit upheld. (In leftist land, the baker must bake the gay wedding cake, but the largest gatekeeper of information in America can do whatever the hell it wants.)
Trump, naturally, knows that Big Tech’s viewpoint discrimination is a problem. He’s known since the day he was elected that the tech giants will use their tremendous power to prevent his reelection. His problem has been that his hands have been tied.
When Trump had a Republican congress, that would have been an excellent time to push through legislation akin to the Civil Rights of 1964, recognizing that the tech titans are places of public accommodation for ideas and that they therefore cannot engage in viewpoint discrimination. Unfortunately, the Russia Hoax, combined with RINO hostility, prevented him from acting. Then, when the House went to the Democrats in 2018, Trump lost any chance of using legislation to tamp down on Silicon Valley’s biased stranglehold on public discourse.
Trump has now done the next best thing. He baited Twitter to comment (incorrectly) on one of his purely political tweets. When Twitter took the bait, it provided an opening for Trump to issue an Executive Order striking at the tech giants’ status as non-publishers, something that has kept them immune from defamation lawsuits and FCC oversight.
The EO begins with a masterful summary of the problems with social media companies:
Free speech is the bedrock of American democracy. Our Founding Fathers protected this sacred right with the First Amendment to the Constitution. The freedom to express and debate ideas is the foundation for all of our rights as a free people.
In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power. They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards, and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators.
[snip]
Online platforms are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse. Tens of thousands of Americans have reported, among other troubling behaviors, online platforms “flagging” content as inappropriate, even though it does not violate any stated terms of service; making unannounced and unexplained changes to company policies that have the effect of disfavoring certain viewpoints; and deleting content and entire accounts with no warning, no rationale, and no recourse.
Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias. As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet. As recently as last week, Representative Adam Schiff was continuing to mislead his followers by peddling the long-disproved Russian Collusion Hoax, and Twitter did not flag those tweets. Unsurprisingly, its officer in charge of so-called “Site Integrity” has flaunted his political bias in his own tweets.
The EO then explains that 47 U.S.C. § 230(c) of the Communications Decency Act has protected the tech companies by holding them harmless from content in third party material on their sites. The goal was to allow social media companies and search engines to delete sex trafficking, terrorism, threats, and other dangerous and illegal content without turning them into custodians and publishers of that content who then could be sued.
What the tech titans have been doing of late, however, is to remove or flag third-party viewpoints with which they disagree. Trump’s requires the agencies tasked with enforcing the Communications Decency Act to recognize that, once the tech giants start interfering with third-party ideas on their sites, they’ve become publishers and have given up their immunity.
Contrary to some claims, this will not end comments on websites. As long as the website owner deletes only imminently dangerous and illegal material (threats, sex trafficking, etc.) but leaves viewpoints intact, the owner is safe. Nor will it end social media, provided that Facebook, Twitter, and the others stop flagging or deleting political statements with which they disagree.
Trump cleverly created an opening, and then he took advantage of it with the best weapons available. In the interests of a free election, we can only hope that these weapons are enough.
Fighting for free speech by punishing free speech and using executive orders to campaign. Great.
AND being praised for it!
@ stevenl:
“the non-left not creating their own platforms” Exactly.
Most of this executive order is illegal because the social media platforms are private companies and they can publish or not publish anything they want.
Also, Trump is clearly using his executive powers to run his and his party’s election campaign by smearing his perceived ideological opponents and limiting their freedom of speech which is also illegal.
If the Right/Conservatives/Republicans and other good, honest, and righteous people feel victimized by Facebook, Twitter, etc., the good, honest, and righteous thing to do would be to set up their own social platforms which would promote The Truth and let these social platforms fight it out in the free market in, allegedly, “the land of the free and the home of the brave” instead of “their man in Washington” issuing executive orders to “right the wrongs done by the leftists”.
There may be a lot more at stake in Trump’s feud with Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter than meets the eye. The editor of an investor’s advice newletter for Banyan Hill Publishing named Jeff Brown, which publishes a number of other financial advice newsletters as well, claims that Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Google are all developing their own private Crypto-currencies to compete with the U.S. dollar and other government currencies. He claims that these four companies are so rich that they each have more assets than the U.S. government! And, he says, their CEOs may already have more power than the President of the United States. At any rate, he claims, they each aspire to have more power than him, and to rule the world.
He describes Mark Zuckerberg as especially megalomaniacal. According to Jeff Brown, this man thinks he is another Augustus Caesar, whom he regards as his role model. Brown claims that in a private conversation, Zuckerberg told him that Augustus brought the world 200 years of peace and prosperity, and he intends to do the same.
Brown says that Twitter has already issued its new crypto-currency, and that the three other communications giants are working furiously to develop theirs to compete with Twitters. He claims that it is technologically feasible to use crypto-currencies to replace existing currencies, and for the tech giants who control them to replace all existing banks, and in effect become the new world banks. With international trade, investing, and banking all in their hands, the communications monopolies may soon rule the world.
I certainly wouldn’t take it for granted that everything that this investor’s newletter writer says is true. He is vague about his personal background. He claims to have been a “high-tech executive” in Silicon Valley” and before that, some sort of engineer working for high-tech firms. I have so far been unable to find a detailed, facts-only biorgraphy of him on the web. But much of what he says about the potential of cryto-currencies to replace “official” money for most large financial transactions is confirmed by other, better-established sources like Reuters and Yahoo’s Finance and Markets.
Really spooky. Bad though it is, the current WHO and world -governments’ created depression may be only the beginning of our worldwide nightmare. We are living in a science fiction horror movie. “Impossible, yes-but its true.”
(The Doors).
Why are the non-left not creating their own platforms and websites?
The left has a quasi MONOPOLY on F political info.
They are a weapon of the W DC kleptocracy.
They need to put up or shut up!