The Rise and Fall of Free Speech: What Big Tech Giveth, Big Tech Taketh Away
To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker? To whom would you delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read?
— Christopher Hitchens
As the collective sigh of millions cascades across the internet due specifically to the mass de-platforming of one Donald J. Trump and a solid number of his breathless worshippers, the adage that that which feels good in the moment may have consequences unforeseen pops up.
So far, the Fat Man in Orange has been kicked out of Twitter, Faceborg, Twitch, Shopify, Reddit, TikTok, Snapchat, as have a host of his more virulent supporters. The folks making these decisions want to spin the tale that, as Lindsey Graham dribbled out of his mouth "...enough is enough." Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see this move from Zuckerberg and Dorsey and even Google, Apple, and Amazon (dumping Parler) are merely jumping from comfortably placating these violent idiots for four years to (finally) removing access because they no longer hold power.
Cowardly shit, in my opinion.
On the other hand, the mostly white seditionists who breached the Capitol are not being charged with treason or insurrection but things like knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building, theft of government property, and the lowball charge of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
So Trump gets his phone taken away and his sycophants get wrist slapped when the whole mess were actively guilty of treason. Sure, Trump will be hastily impeached (a second time) and acquitted (a second time) so until the District Attorney of New York goes after the modern Capone for tax evasion, we bask momentarily in any consequence no matter how tepid and small.
Wait a minute. What?
After four and half years of Trump using the largest communications platforms known to man to subtly and sometimes brazenly dog-whistle his followers into violence, we celebrate his de-platforming without the thought that that makes Zuckerberg and Dorsey the two most powerful people on the planet?
At this point, Google, Apple, Faceborg, and Twitter are collectively more powerful than almost any nation in the world and these platforms have allowed this to happen in the first place. I see those hardcore GOP Senators who went along and in many cases enabled Trump's horror show now step back and ask for us to move past all this in the cause of unity. What the Big Tech cats are doing is exactly the same thing.
Back in the Bush Jr. days when I had a Blogspot entitled “An Angry White Guy in Chicago” I wrote a metric ton of spew about that lost eight years. It was my way of trying to move the needle a bit in a Leftie way and vent my overstuffed spleen.
My second ex-wife and I were flying to North Carolina to visit her family and, at the airport, I was informed that I was on a “No Fly” list. I was taken to a tiny room in the backwaters of O’Hare and interrogated about threats I’d made online against Vice President Dick Cheney. The “threats”? I had mentioned in an “I Believe...” that if I saw Cheney in person I’d want to slap him hard in the face.
Not that I thought we needed to “go to war” against Trump or BLM. Not the “I hope the Orange President should die of colon cancer.” Not that Hillary Clinton should be raped and murdered. Not that Nancy Pelosi should be hung. Slapped. I may have added “bitch” to describe the slap but that was the extent of my “threats.”
My second ex-wife went to North Carolina. I stayed home and sulked. That’s how government oversight is supposed to work (whether I thought Cheney should get popped in then jaw or not) and when I see the tweets of both the Right and the Left calling for violence against the chosen enemies of their ideology I’m gobsmacked that these morons aren’t flagged and taken into an airport bathroom and grilled.
At a time when the progressive left wants to define offensive speech as violence and the white nationalists want to define increased equity as genocide, it’s extraordinary how similar the online speech of both fringes has become.
And our only stopgap to this is in the hands of two dudes in charge of these platforms?
There are two ways to look at Superman. He’s either Christopher Reeve, all powerful yet benevolent, an unrelenting god with nothing but good intentions and with our best interests at heart. A Boy Scout (but in the truest sense rather than the homophobic kind).
Or he’s the way Zack Snyder sees him. A being so powerful he cannot be held accountable for the mayhem caused when he has to fight the Big Bad, so god-like that when the buildings fall during his melee with Zod and kill thousands of innocent people, there is nothing to be done but shrug and be happy he isn’t pissed off at us.
Zuckerberg and Dorsey have the power to melt our faces off with their laser eyeballs and we either trust that they won’t use that power on the wrong people when their having a rough morning or regulate their power in ways that no longer leave it up to their whim. Because that’s why Trump has been de-platformed. The whim of two men in charge of the most powerful communications networks in the history of mankind.
To whom would you delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read?
