Posted on 08/11/2018 8:14:57 AM PDT by TBP
In a column criticizing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s decision not to ban Alex Jones from the social media site, a writer for The Verge attacked the principle of free speech as “dangerously naive.”
Laura Hudson, The Verge’s culture editor, said Twitter is wrong to believe that a free marketplace of ideas is sufficient to push back against harmful conspiracy theories.
“Who doesn’t want to think that the truth will always win in the end, that information not only wants to be free, but that this freedom will lead us toward a more just world — especially when it is your job to share information?” Hudson wrote. “But in our current moment, it is a dangerously naive idea.”
Why would free speech be bad? Hudson cited numerous studies that promote the idea that once people have believed false information, presenting them with the correct information later could just entrench them more deeply in the false belief.
Therefore, Hudson argues, social media sites like Twitter have an obligation to carefully police the speech on their platforms to limit the amplification and exposure of poisonous ideas.
“Instead, far too many of the biggest social platforms continue to tie themselves — and, by extension, their millions of users — to the railroad tracks of unfettered speech, more fearful of exuding a whiff of censorship than the oncoming train of misinformation and hate that is already barreling down upon us,” Hudson wrote.
Hudson says the First Amendment was meant to protect the public from state oppression, meaning it should not necessarily apply to what a company like Twitter allows to be posted.
“Twitter does not have the power to throw people into prison; indeed, the greater potential threat Twitter poses to the public is not its ability to lock someone’s account if they use racial slurs, but the harm it has done, and is doing, by feeding its oxygen to the ugliest and most destructive elements of society — ones that better and more civilized communities and platforms would quickly banish for the good not only of its most vulnerable members, but for discourse at large,” Hudson wrote.
Background The debate over banning users from media platforms reignited when Apple, Spotify, YouTube and Facebook removed content by Alex Jones from their sites due to alleged violations of those sites’ hate speech policies.
Many users called for Twitter to follow suit, but Dorsey has refrained from doing so, saying Jones has not violated its rules.
“If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction,” Dorsey tweeted earlier this week. That’s not us.”
The LEFT is tyranny cloaked in liberty.
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"They [La Prensa] accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it." -- Nelba Blandon, Interior Ministry Director of Censorship, quoted in the New York Times in (wait for it) ...1984.
First they came for Alex Jones. I wasn’t an Alex Jones fan, so I didn’t speak up.
Then they came for Gavin McInnes...
I was in the room covering the session when Blandon said that. I was one of the people who reported the quote. (The only one? I don’t know, but I didn’t see it elsewhere.)
Why Free Speech?
Because 95% of so called Journalists are self admitted Democrats, Liberals, Progressives and / or Socialists.
Of the remaining 5%, four out of five are Liars.
That’s why.
“If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction,” Dorsey tweeted earlier this week. That’s not us.”
The criteria should be legal/illegal not some vague “offensive” or “hate”. Just about every word that comes out of the LEFT’s mouth is offensive to me. Should I be hitting the abuse button every chance I get? Not if I believe in free speech.
This is more evidence that our education system has deteriorated into a threat to the founding principles of our nation. Too many young people really believe in curtailing speech that hurts people’s feelings or is “offensive”. They are unable to think through what it would mean to hand over power to limit freedom of speech.
Freedom of the press is ‘dangerously naive idea’ that leads to ‘amplification of lies,’
Sounds better?
“The ugliest and most destructive elements of society”
Hollyweirdos
Pinko professors
Rap “singers”
Wife beating athletes
Anarchist rioters
Anti-Christian bigots
Liberals
Progressives
Democrats
Pro-abortonists
They admit it. They plan to eliminate free speech totally. Mostly gone already.
Laura Hudson’s solution: Police speech on the web. Really? Typical liberal solution: make it illegal. Liberals and Conservatives respond so differently:
Don’t like a TV program’s content:
Conservative: change the channel
Liberal: pass a law to ban the content
Don’t want to bake a cake for a certain couple:
Conservative: find a bakery that will or bake your own
Liberal: pass a law that forces every bakery to bake anything for everyone
Don’t think kids should drink a 32oz soda:
Conservative: don’t buy 32oz sodas
Liberal: pass a law that bans 32 oz sodas
At every turn, Liberals want to restrict your freedom of choice and most Americans go right along with it. Stupid.
Good God!
Does this writer realize how stupid this is? Naive doesn't even get close.
Think about the kind of people who have come out the last few years attacking truly open and free speech.
Would you trust ANY single one of them to decide what kind of things you can see, hear and read? Nobody has the moral authority to decide that for me, and even if anyone did, it certainly wouldn’t be any one of THEM.
Fascists really, really despise freedom, don’t they? This is the the kind of crap you’d expect to read if you asked a bunch of random students in Maoist China back during “the cultural revolution” to critique America’s Bill of Rights.
You can still read this kind of garbage today, any day, by the moundful, on Chinese internet boards. Democrazy, they call it. And it’s taken over America. You think Civil War II isn’t coming? Where can I get a pair of those rose colored glasses?
We will protect you, peasants, from the truth.
The prime priority and goal for the cancerous libtard progressive left.....not even go into legitimate Nazi comparisons.......
The press is full of delusional idiots. When communists take over the first group of people they usually kill are the loudmouth agitators because they never shut up and become a complication. By eliminating them with prejudice actually buys the revolutionaries some credibility with the citizens who hate them with a passion.
What about banning left-wing speech?
What about banning the political left?
These people are a cancer on our great nation and should be hunted down like the vermin they are.
It's staggering how blind some people are in that they are using the very thing that gives them their freedom to attack the thing that gives them their freedom.>
This guy's comment is idiotic beyond measure.
Like them controlling the flow of information guarantees truth?
I don't think so.
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