Author: Crowhill Report

CNN Issues Correction, Saying Rep. Ted Lieu ‘Grabbed A ProBar Energy Bar’, Rather Than ‘A Crowbar’ Amidst Capitol Riots

Amazing.

The First Amendment prohibits the government from interfering with free speech. Nothing stops the tech oligarchs because they are private companies.

This is wrong and must change.

As a rule, I am against giving the government more power, but in this case it is necessary (and overdue). In the modern age, allowing the tech companies to regulate speech on their so-called platforms is as absurd as allowing AT&T to regulate what you say on the phone, or the post office to regulate what you can say in a letter. The difference is a regulatory fiction that has to be eliminated.

A standard pro-market response would be to say that if one company does something people don’t like, they can take their business elsewhere. That kind of simplistic answer is entirely insufficient for this situation. We wouldn’t accept that logic with the phone carriers. We take it as given that the phone companies can’t regulate what you say. We need to have the same attitude towards online methods of communication.

The tech companies need to be regulated immediately.

Today will be a rare day in two ways. First, I am calling for more government regulation, and second, I find myself in agreement with the World Leaders [who] Denounce Big Tech Censorship of President Donald Trump.

We cannot leave it to American Big Tech to decide how we can or cannot discuss online. Today’s mechanisms destroy the compromise searching and consensus-building that are crucial in free and democratic societies. We need a stricter regulatory approach.

The hypocrisy of the tech oligarchs is astonishing, but they get away with it all the time.

In Russia, the opposition leader, Alexey Navalny, who is an outspoken anti-corruption campaigner, said he believed the ban was an unacceptable form of censorship and was based not on a genuine need but rather Twitter’s political preferences.

In a thread posted on the platform on Jan. 10, Navalny said: “Don’t tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules. I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn’t ban anyone.”

As private citizens, the tech oligarchs are free to contradict themselves and have absurd and inconsistent standards however they like, but the management of companies of the size and reach we’re discussing can’t be left to private whims. Otherwise, why have laws against monopolies?

And that brings us to the real bottom line here. We oppose monopolies because they exercise too much economic power. They can charge absurd rates for service and keep others out of the market, and we rightly object to that.

Here’s the gut check. Do we value economic power more than we value free speech? To say that Twitter, as a private company, can ban speech, so long as they don’t have monopoly power in the market, is to say that money is more important than ideas. I reject that. I don’t want companies to have too much power in the market, but I am far more concerned with companies having too much power in the marketplace of ideas.

I’m sure you’ve heard the rumblings about people and apps being banned from one place or another.

When it comes to rules governing free speech, it seems clear to me that what we want is simple fair play, and the best way to express that would be that the rules should be written so that it wouldn’t matter if your worst enemy was enforcing them.

Smitemouth posted a comment with a link to an article about why people believe weird things and strange conspiracies. I think the article raises some good points, but it reminds me of something I’ve been wondering about.

Before the internet, you couldn’t be as choosy about your friends. Even little social circles of like-minded people were limited by geography, and they were mostly made up of people in your neighborhood, at work, or at school. This forced people into regular contact with all sorts.

If you were in a bowling league, or Boy Scouts, or swim team, or played poker with your neighbors, you were going to run into people with weird ideas. That was just the way it was, and you dealt with it.

“Yeah, Johnny has some weird ideas about the Kennedy assassination, but humor him. We need him on the team.”

That sort of an environment did two things. First, it moderated your craziness, because you had to get along with people who didn’t share your peculiar views, and second, it forced everybody to be more tolerant of crazy views when they did come up.

This is well-covered ground. Everybody knows that the internet allows you to be “friends” with a collection of 25 crazies from anywhere on the planet who share your nutty views about the Nephilim, or whatever.

I’m saying (and this might not be new either) there’s another side to it. By being somewhat forced to make friends and get along with people who are brought together for non-ideological reasons (live in the same neighborhood, go to the same school, work at the same factory, play the same sport), people learn to be tolerant.

If I go on a cruise, and they seat me at a table with ten other people, I’m not going to say outlandish things, and I’m not going to get into it with somebody who does. I’m going to try to get along.

Our problem is not only from the negative impact of the Internet. It’s from the lack of the positive impact that we used to have by being forced to get along with people.

Unfortunately, the internet has spoiled these real-life interactions as well. People are so used to surrounding themselves with like-minded people, and shunning people who transgress the limits, they bring that attitude into real-life situations. They assume everybody else believes what they believe, and when they find a dissenter they are intolerant.