Free Speech, Censorship, and the First Amendment

[Steve R.]

Gutfeld! My pilates partner was banned from YouTube | Fox News Video

Fox News host Dan Bongino and Greg Gutfeld discuss Bongino's permanent ban from YouTube for questioning the efficacy of masks.

video.foxnews.com

Beyond, the useless autocratic vaccines mandates, is the issue of free speech, and the "tension" between your rights for free speech under the First Amendment and the ability of non-federal entities to assert that they can squelch (censor) your speech with impunity. At the 2:30 minute mark, Dan Bongino provides very insightful analysis that covers some aspects that I have not fully unpacked. Specifically, that censorship and the First Amendment should not be conflated meaning that if there is no First Amendment issue, then it is acceptable to suppress speech (censor). They are discrete. So when a company pompously squelches speech under the guise that there is no First Amendment "intersection", it still should be called censorship and condemned. Accepting that dishonest construct is a form of deflection that requires push-back, especially considering that these social media companies assert to be a public forum.

Bonfgino also notes, that some members of Congress (as public officials) deceitfully advocate that some social media sites must take down "misinformation". So here we have public officials, who should be supporting free speech, actually demanding that private enterprise censor content. That is wrong.

 

[Pat Hartman]

If a company cannot refuse to make a cake with words/decorations that conflict with their religious beliefs, how can they be allowed to censor your speech?

Those feckless Republican pieces of dog do do are allowing this to happen. This has been going on for years and for whatever reason, the Republicans have flatly refused to step up and remove the protections granted to social media companies because they were supposedly just the publishers and so shouldn't be responsible for content. Now we all know that they are responsible for content and therefor should have NO PROTECTIONS. Talk about splitting them up is just idiotic. It's like saying that east of the Mississippi, you get your news from company x but west of the Mississippi, you get your news from company y. Breaking them up makes no sense. Prosecuting them for hate speech or slander and fomenting insurrection is a different matter.

When the dust clears and it becomes apparent that social media in cahoots with the Biden administration have been withholding treatments that could have prevented hundreds of thousands of people from dying of COVID we should be able to unleash a tsunami of lawsuits. If you lost a loved one because their doctor sent them home and told them suck it up or to go to the hospital if they couldn't breath, that is malpractice. Trump signed a "right to try" bill that gives people the right to try certain treatments that are not officially recognized when there are no other options. How does this not apply to COVID?

 

[GinaWhipp]

If a company cannot refuse to make a cake with words/decorations that conflict with their religious beliefs, how can they be allowed to censor your speech?

But they did. There was one that was in the news in 2018 for doing just that. The Supreme Court eventually sided with the Baker. IMHO, I believe that was the beginning of the slippery slope... and now we are here sliding down that slope at full speed.