feels good to see liberals standing up for 1A rights 💪. great article:
> “You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test,” Walz said.
> “Tim. Fire in a crowded theater? You guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers should not wear masks,” Vance replied.
> The equivalence that Vance draws between social-media moderation and Trump trying to stage a coup is ridiculous, but revealing in terms of how conservatives have come to conceive of free speech: They believe that right-wing speech should be sacrosanct, and liberal speech officially disfavored. Walz is simply wrong about the Supreme Court standard for what kind of speech can be outlawed, but the invocation of that archaic test does illustrate how safety can become an excuse for state censorship. It just so happens that social-media moderation is not state censorship, because social media is not the government.
> But the fact that the government can put you in prison points to how matters of free speech are different for social-media companies. Social-media companies can’t put you in prison, because they are not the government. They can ban users for not adhering to their standards, but this in itself is a form of speech: Just as the right-wing website Breitbart does not have to publish my writing, social-media companies do not have to publish the content of users who violate their rules. Social-media moderation is not state censorship, and it should not be treated as such. Conservatives understand this when the moderation decisions land in their favor, which is why the union-busting billionaire Elon Musk’s favoritism toward conservative speech and attempts to silence his critics on the social-media platform X have not drawn the attention of the Republican majority in Congress. Nor should they—he owns the place; he can do what he wants with it. The point is that conservatives fully get the distinction when they want to.
> Vance’s implicit position is that conservatives have a state-enforced right to the use of private platforms; that the state can and should force private companies to publish speech that those companies disagree with, as long as that speech is right-wing. Such a policy really would be a form of censorship.
> Immediately after Trump’s disastrous September debate, conservatives, including Trump himself, began calling for ABC News to lose its broadcast license for fact-checking Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. These threats of state retaliation against media outlets—or anyone who speaks out against Trump—illustrate that what conservatives mean when they talk about free speech is a legal right to use private platforms as venues for right-wing propaganda, whether or not those platforms wish to be used that way. That is a form of censorship far more authoritarian than private social-media platforms deciding they don’t want to carry rants about COVID shots putting microchips in your blood that can receive signals from alien invaders.
> As for Walz, he foolishly cited an archaic standard that the Supreme Court has thankfully abandoned, one that in actuality shows how dangerous it can be for the government to pick and choose which speech is acceptable. Walz has previously asserted that “misinformation” and “hate speech” are not protected, a mistaken belief that is unfortunately popular among some on the left. The flawed standard he cited last night explains why such speech is and should be protected—because the window for state power to police what individual people say should be as small as reasonably possible.
> His opponents Trump and Vance, however, do not think that such an approach is dangerous at all. A government that chooses which speech to punish and which to promote is their ideal situation, provided that they are the ones in charge.
1 Comment
feels good to see liberals standing up for 1A rights 💪. great article:
> “You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test,” Walz said.
> “Tim. Fire in a crowded theater? You guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers should not wear masks,” Vance replied.
> The equivalence that Vance draws between social-media moderation and Trump trying to stage a coup is ridiculous, but revealing in terms of how conservatives have come to conceive of free speech: They believe that right-wing speech should be sacrosanct, and liberal speech officially disfavored. Walz is simply wrong about the Supreme Court standard for what kind of speech can be outlawed, but the invocation of that archaic test does illustrate how safety can become an excuse for state censorship. It just so happens that social-media moderation is not state censorship, because social media is not the government.
> But the fact that the government can put you in prison points to how matters of free speech are different for social-media companies. Social-media companies can’t put you in prison, because they are not the government. They can ban users for not adhering to their standards, but this in itself is a form of speech: Just as the right-wing website Breitbart does not have to publish my writing, social-media companies do not have to publish the content of users who violate their rules. Social-media moderation is not state censorship, and it should not be treated as such. Conservatives understand this when the moderation decisions land in their favor, which is why the union-busting billionaire Elon Musk’s favoritism toward conservative speech and attempts to silence his critics on the social-media platform X have not drawn the attention of the Republican majority in Congress. Nor should they—he owns the place; he can do what he wants with it. The point is that conservatives fully get the distinction when they want to.
> Vance’s implicit position is that conservatives have a state-enforced right to the use of private platforms; that the state can and should force private companies to publish speech that those companies disagree with, as long as that speech is right-wing. Such a policy really would be a form of censorship.
> Immediately after Trump’s disastrous September debate, conservatives, including Trump himself, began calling for ABC News to lose its broadcast license for fact-checking Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. These threats of state retaliation against media outlets—or anyone who speaks out against Trump—illustrate that what conservatives mean when they talk about free speech is a legal right to use private platforms as venues for right-wing propaganda, whether or not those platforms wish to be used that way. That is a form of censorship far more authoritarian than private social-media platforms deciding they don’t want to carry rants about COVID shots putting microchips in your blood that can receive signals from alien invaders.
> As for Walz, he foolishly cited an archaic standard that the Supreme Court has thankfully abandoned, one that in actuality shows how dangerous it can be for the government to pick and choose which speech is acceptable. Walz has previously asserted that “misinformation” and “hate speech” are not protected, a mistaken belief that is unfortunately popular among some on the left. The flawed standard he cited last night explains why such speech is and should be protected—because the window for state power to police what individual people say should be as small as reasonably possible.
> His opponents Trump and Vance, however, do not think that such an approach is dangerous at all. A government that chooses which speech to punish and which to promote is their ideal situation, provided that they are the ones in charge.
!ping SNEK