This was an issue I was going to discuss earlier, but I felt that it was important to instead to touch on the passing of John McCain. I feel that it is important to discuss the issues of censorship and free speech vs hate speech.
Free speech is perhaps our most important freedom enshrined in our Bill of Rights. It goes under the same umbrella with freedom of press and protest. Citizens are allowed to use the First Amendment to stand up to injustice and speak truth to power.
The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the feminist movement, and any movement that wants to bring about progress owes part of its success to the First Amendment.
As technology becomes more advanced, there are new ways to communicate ideas. Most would agree the internet serves to spread information across the globe. However, social media platforms are not public. They are private enterprises and can operate independently from the Bill of Rights.
Laura Ingrahm of Fox News has proposed making social media public recently on her show. Why would a conservative want to disrupt the free market and give a major industry to the government? Because she believes, as do many right-wingers, that social media platforms are censoring conservatives.
Conservatives believe that Twitter and Facebook are using methods like "shadowbanning" (when your name doesn't show up when people search for you) and other methods to silence conservative voices. Liberals then cheerfully remind them that as a business, social media platforms can do as they wish.
This debate has been going on since the 2016 election, even Trump has made comments about it. However, the issue was re-ignited when Infowars host, the far-right commentator, Alex Jones was banned from Youtube and Facebook.
This was most likely due to the time Jones called the Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax due to it resurfacing when parents of the victims said they have received death threats from people that watch Jones's show.
However, what people like to forget is that Jones is not your run-of-the-mill conservative. He is a far-right conspiracy theorist that should be lucky that the government does not go after him.
After all, free speech is null and void if your speech creates a "clear and present" danger. Far-right conspiracy theories such as white genocide and Pizzagate have caused the number of far-right terrorist attacks in this country to go up. By furthering these lies, Jones is putting more people in harm's way as the far-right continues to prove its capacity for violence.
There are many conservatives that still are able to use social media because their views are not seen as harmful or dangerous. Conservatives also accuse social media platforms of lowering their follower's count and lowering the activity on their posts.
Conservatives need to consider that perhaps the reason why they have low follower counts and not a lot of likes on their tweets is because most people that use Twitter are usually younger people who lean to the left.
And as for nationalizing social media companies, conservatives have no right to demand or suggest this when they consistently defend private business and corporations on every issue. They cheered when a baker refused to make a cake for a gay couple getting married. Would conservatives be ok with making the baker industry public?
