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A. N. Owen's avatar

I'm reminded of Thomas Paine's quote, "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

This was more or less the moral linchpin that drove the evolution of American civil rights from the founding of the nation with the Declaration of Independence. One could write American history as a long slog from a group of elitist merchants and planters to all common white men, then extended to immigrants, then Catholics, then African Americans and the freed slaves (even mostly in theory initially), to women's enfranchisement of the 1920s, to the 1960s Civil Rights movement, then the gays and lesbians movement, and so forth. There's clear honesty to the dedication of this principle in American liberalism and how it justifies the course of our history and approach to the future, and by sticking to it no matter the disagreements, it did deliver tremendous rewards and greater freedoms for more people.

But what we have been seeing recently is a clear retreat from this principle, ironically on groups of "justice" and "fairness" and "equity." And we're seeing this manifest itself very strongly in the recent attacks of free speech, which was traditionally the most sacred of American beliefs. I like to think that for most of American history there was an acknowledgement that if you restricted people's access to free speech, you only opened up yourself to a whole new set of abuses of civil rights and individual free-will. Our history certainly shows this - the severe prejudices against American blacks in the past, the McCarthyism anti-communism paranoia of the 1950s, the periodic attempts of religious evangelicals to impose their morality on the American public.

However, this new marriage between Silicon Valley and progressive Democrats has resulted in a hegemony that finds it acceptable to severely restrict access to "undesirable" speech. While there is a certain sympathy to this idea, after all, we don't like neo-Nazis running amok, but a) who determines what is undesirable and not? and b) in real life it's only resulted in double standards, which is what always happens when you violate Paine's principle. Upon what principle can you ban Parler but not other communication forums? Maybe you argue that Parler was responsible (somehow) for the Capitol riot. But what about twitter and Facebook during the BLM riots of 2020? Many people used those sources to organize the protests and even coordinate riots, along with expressing violent thoughts as well as support for the riots and antifa protests.

True, the Silicon Valley platforms are privately owned. But there is no public sphere equivalent of these platforms. I don't pretend to have a clear cut answer to how to reconcile the sphere of privately owned platforms with that they are predominately treated and accepted by the public as an extension of public space and an extension of our free will and free speech. There was a period in the late 1980s/1990s when free speech advocates (all lefties, of course), were arguing that shopping malls had become de facto public spaces because so many Americans now lived in suburban areas with no real public space. It's more or less the same argument but on a much bigger and problematic scale.

Nonetheless, we now easily see how by establishing a clear precedence for only one accepted standard by a handful of companies that control, what, 95+% of the online access, we have a hegemony that treats one set of violence as acceptable and even part of civic democracy, the 2020 protests, while another set of violence, the Capitol attack, is treated as a wave of fascism that must be defeated at all costs (even of the latter was primarily a bunch of crazy boys running amok for a few hours, while the former caused billions in damage to public and private property and multiple deaths in cities across America - but let's leave that aside for now).

Whenever a double standard emerges from treating beliefs and ideas and principles differently, hypocrisy always emerges. And one of the tragedies of that hypocrisy is when the hypocritical class tries to hide from their hypocrisy through being "fair" in utterly arbitrary actions affecting innocent bystanders, like these film producers.

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A Pragmatist, SE Wisconsin's avatar

It is imperative to create free speech alternatives to all social media.

This needs to include every single piece of critical infrastructure, supporting these means of communication, as has become obvious. Any critical infrastructure: hosting, payment services (PayPal, Visa, GoFundMe), YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc - Free speech versions of all of these services need to be available, in a way which is completely immune to arbitrary interruption by parties not committed to free speech.

This is important, but is also an opportunity for profit.

The examples of conservatives being denied equal access, are becoming ever more bold and egregious.

This should concern all of us, not just conservatives.

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