Displaying items by tag: censorship

Over the weekend, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made comments that would seem to confirm some suspicions I’ve had.

The year may be new, but its problems are old. As 2022 gets underway, we find our society yet again grappling with pandemic policies, school closings, and the content moderation practices of Big Tech.

On Oct. 5, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testified before the U.S. Senate, decrying her former employer's "destructive impact" and warning that "without action, divisive and extremist behaviors we see today are only the beginning."

As an academic dean of library services for the past 40 years, I think I have a good eye for what constitutes censorship. Cancel culture, a new term for an old and deadly form of silencing your enemies has recently shown its ugly face and has unmistakably assumed the role of free speech bullies. Not since the McCarthy Era have we seen such proscription of speech, and it appears to be unrelenting. The eagerness with which these new speech bullies seek to prohibit ideas is now ubiquitous, and the desire to cancel scores of individuals from Washington State to, well, the heart of the reddest of Red States, Rock Hill, South Carolina, where I live, is raging.

"If [Donald] Trump and [Bernie] Sanders take the same position on Big Tech censorship," David Catron writes at The American Spectator, "the issue deserves serious attention."

Recently, I told my wife that the 2020 election follies made me think of John Milton. She commented that I may have been the only one in America to make that connection to the second most important author in the English language, after Shakespeare, best known for his poetry. After all, very little of this year’s politics has been poetic (though it could be argued to fit somewhere in Paradise Lost). I was thinking of Milton’s prose.

"Facebook Employees Are Outraged At Mark Zuckerberg's Explanations Of How It Handled The Kenosha Violence," reads the headline at Buzzfeed. One such employee asks "[a]t what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services?"

While local liquor boards try to make the case that bureaucrats can do a better job than private businesses when it comes to managing the sale of alcoholic beverages, some small-minded censors at the North Carolina ABC Commission are spoiling for a First Amendment fight over irreverent craft beer names. 

 To the extent Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube and other online companies engage in viewpoint discrimination against conservatives and Republicans, they deserve condemnation and ridicule. But do they also merit oversight by lawmakers or regulators?

Could the president known for his turbulent relationship with the media and strident criticism of negative news stories become a free-speech savior?