Last night Amazon, Apple, and Google shut down Twitter’s competitor, a small social media company called “Parler.”
Twitter has been blocking and censoring conservative voices for a long time. When they became blatant about it, and particularly after blocking the nation’s fourth largest newspaper for running a factually correct story that was critical of candidate Biden’s son Hunter, people began leaving Twitter and moving to Parler, which promised free speech without bias and censorship.
So the tech giants shut Parler down.
They have “reasons.” Tyrants always have “reasons” until they don’t need reasons anymore and can just do what they want.
Don’t let anyone convince you that this is just or right. We have very narrow laws that limit certain kinds of speech. They’re narrow for a reason, the product of centuries of legal wrangling and debate. What the tech giants are doing is saying that the laws aren’t good enough, and that, “for the common good,” it’s necessary to restrict speech beyond what the law prohibits. They’re taking it upon themselves to decide which protected speech is worthwhile and which is not, and to prohibit us from engaging in the kind they don’t think is worthwhile.
There is a new elite rising, a class of smart, young, educated, well-paid person who believes that people shouldn’t be allowed to say things that experts — that is, that their preferred experts — think are incorrect. They think that their superior intelligence, information, and judgment give them the right to silence views they consider harmful or irresponsible.
They will go on at great length to make their case, but it always come back to this: free speech is good, but only if it’s the *right* speech. Laws aren’t sufficient to protect us from wrong thinking, and so they’re going to help out. For the common good. For the people.
Tell them to stuff it.
—–
As one of those smart young technocrats commented yesterday on one of my posts:
“We are witnessing the halted of fascism enabling platforms. The fourth branch of government is speaking….”
So let me ask you: do *you* remember voting for Twitter, Google, Apple, and Amazon to represent you, to govern you, and to decide what you can and can’t say? Can you find this “fourth branch of government” in the Constitution?