The First Amendment prohibits the government from interfering with free speech. Nothing stops the tech oligarchs because they are private companies. <\/p>\n
This is wrong and must change. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
The tech companies need to be regulated immediately. <\/p>\n
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<\/a>. <\/p>\n We cannot leave it to American Big Tech to decide how we can or cannot discuss online. Today\u2019s mechanisms destroy the compromise searching and consensus-building that are crucial in free and democratic societies. We need a stricter regulatory approach.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The hypocrisy of the tech oligarchs is astonishing, but they get away with it all the time. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s political preferences.<\/p>\n In a thread posted on the platform on Jan. 10, Navalny said: \u201cDon\u2019t tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules. I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn\u2019t ban anyone.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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? <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading “It’s time for government control of the so-called platforms”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=965"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":966,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions\/966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}