By banning Donald Trump, Facebook is engaging in a self-interested assault on free speech.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, announced on Thursday that President Donald Trump’s accounts on that platform and on Instagram have been banned indefinitely. The justification for the unprecedented move is that Trump’s accounts are fomenting violence. But whatever one thinks of the president’s actions or social media statements on Wednesday, censoring the sitting president of the United States on these platforms is not a proper remedy.
The logic behind the ban is tenuous at best. Trump did not call for violence or the storming of the Capitol, and while his real-time reaction to the events seemed to many as insufficient, he was not condoning them. He did not, for example, tweet out to his supporters asking them to donate to a bail fund for the rioters, as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris did during the Minneapolis riots. This is a blatant and obvious double-standard.
Zuckerberg says the president’s claims of voter fraud are not true and that it would be too dangerous to allow him to continue making them on Facebook. But if expressing an opinion that might lead some to violence is enough to earn a user a ban, then Facebook is using an inverse heckler’s veto. There are all kinds of opinions that could lead people to act violently. Facebook should not arbitrate those opinions if they do not contain a direct call for violence. They certainly should not be doing so in a politically biased manner.
It is also important to recognize that Facebook is not a neutral party here. Nobody has argued more strenuously to revoke Section 230 than Trump and his congressional allies. That is a direct threat to Facebook, which would lose protections it currently has and be subject to lawsuits just like any other publisher. The upshot is that the company is choosing to silence one of its most...
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1 comment:
And, the point is??????? The socialists have won the battle. Not the war, but the battle today.
And as long as people use google, facebook, twitter and other socialist dominated platforms, they will continue winning. This site uses google for login. The irony of that is not missed.
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