The next morning, I awoke to a bright red banner across the top of my article informing me and my readers that the article was “under investigation or found in violations of the Medium Rules.” The graphic accompanying this article is a snippet of Medium’s post on my page. The next day, Medium’s bright red notice of violation was on all my articles.

The issue is not whether my articles appear in any specific publication. That is an irrelevant concern. The issue is about the message Medium and other social media corporations send to the public when they censor.

The communications genius, Marshall McLuhan prophetically noted in 1964, “The medium is the message.”

McLuhan asserted a communications medium is not neutral. While the medium delivers content, it also has a character that is usually overlooked. The character delivers notice of a long-term structural, social change. He gives the example of a news story about crime. McLuhan explains the story is less about crime than bringing the crime into homes to create fear and change public attitudes about crime. Since the public focuses on the content of the story, it, many times misses the subtle attitudinal changes the medium’s character is foisting upon society. As to social media, the character of its long-term message is to change public attitudes about speech it finds objectionable and to foster an acceptance of censoring such speech.

McLuhan urges us to understand the character of the messages being delivered so we notice “change in our societal…conditions” which “indicates the presence of a new message.” He views the recognition of these new conditions as an opportunity to understand the detrimental changes being delivered and to address them before harm occurs.

Today, social media bombards us with its party-line content on specific issues; vaccine mandates, immigration, stolen elections, the January 6, 2021 “insurrection,” racism, and the list seems to be infinite. But the character the medium embeds in its messages is the need to censor what it deems objectionable speech. Social media is sending us early warning of the detrimental effects of its censorship. If we do not resist its message, the result will be the death of free speech.

Resistance can start today if each reader circulates a copy of this article and the graphic to their friends.

This is a long introduction to my article “A Scholarship for Every Student, Why Not We Pay for It Now!” which is set out in full below. Judge for yourself its content but also ask what is the character of the message being delivered by Medium and the other social media corporations about their right to censor free speech?

A Scholarship for Every Student, Why Not We Pay for It Now!

William L. Kovacs

The local, state, and federal governments already spend more, on average, on public education, than it would cost to award a scholarship to every student equal to the average cost of education in the U.S. Unfortunately, most of our taxpayer dollars just go to public schools that are very expensive, union-controlled, and do not produce results. For taxpayers to get value for their dollars, the money should follow the student and let the student and parents choose the school. If public schools want to stay in business, the motto should be “Let Them Compete for Students.” The competition will also foster much-needed creativity in the fossilized Teachers’ Unions.

The Number of Students: The Census estimates there are 53,591,620, K-12 students in the United States. The National Center for Education Statistics and the Council for American Private Education, estimates approximately 48.6 million of these students are in public schools. 5.7 million are in private school, which is comprised of Catholic (53%), nonsectarian (14.8%), conservative Christian (12%), and other religious (19.3). Since all the numbers are estimates, and school populations change yearly, the number of students does not add up as neatly as numbers on a corporate balance sheet. There is a small discrepancy in the different estimates, so for ease of calculating let’s round off the number of U.S. students to 54 million nationwide.

Cost Per Student: In constant 2019-2020 dollars, the cost per student in public education is $14,891, which includes teachers, capital expenditures, and interest payments. The total cost of public education in the U.S. is $762 billion.

The average cost per student across all of private education for its 5.7 million students is $10,740.00. This is the average of Catholic schools, $6,890; other religious schools, $8,690 and non-sectarian private schools, $21,510. Using the averages, the total annual cost of private school education is a little over $61 billion.

Total Cost of K-12 Education: The cumulative cost of educating all K-12 students in the United States is $762 billion in taxpayer funding for public education and another $61 billion in parent funding for private schools. Total funding for U.S. K-12 education is $823 billion or $15,240 per student.

Total Taxpayer Funding for Education in the U.S. that Can Be Distributed as Scholarships to Students: Taxpayers provide $762 billion to public schools and another $202 billion dollars to run the U.S. Department of Education, for a total expenditure of $964 billion. Since total K-12 education (public and private) is $ 823 billion, there is more than enough taxpayer funding for education to award a $15,240 scholarship to every K-12 student in the U.S. for use at the school of their choice and have $ 143 billion left over.

The U.S. spends more on education per student than 33 of the 36 OECD countries. Only Luxenberg, Austria, and Norway spend more, yet the U.S. ranks 28^th in math worldwide, 18^th in reading, and 22^nd in science. Clearly, the American taxpayer is not getting value for its money spent on its public school system.

Students Will Use Taxpayer Scholarships More Wisely than Government Directives: Almost every indicator on educational satisfaction finds private schools provide better-educated students, more satisfaction with teachers, happier parents, higher test scores, more advanced course of studies taken, and better and more manageable class sizes.

A Gallup poll of Americans found “Seventy-eight percent of Americans say children educated in private schools receive an excellent or good education.” It also found 69% believed parochial or religious schools provided an excellent or good quality education. Only 30% believed public schools provided an excellent or good education.

Parents of students attending private schools were substantially happier with the private school’s performance than parents of public schools, by significant margins. Private school parents had a substantially higher favorability rating for all aspects of school life than parents of public-school students. Specifically, there is a 78% to 57% public vs private favorability for teachers, 78% to 55% for academic standards, 83% to 56% for school discipline, and 81% to 56% for overall school satisfaction.

Another benefit of private school education is that students are more likely to have higher SAT scores, and attain college degrees. For private schools, the national average SAT score is Private 1230, whereas nationwide, the average test score is 1051.

The resources for providing good education to all students are available now. Students and parents will select the best school for the student; private, public, or trade. By allowing students to control their futures, rather than an authoritarian teacher’s union, out-of-touch school boards, or federal regulation writer, students will determine their educational path and career goals.

Action Items:

1. Each state and local school authority can redirect all current education funding from school districts to the students in those districts in the form of scholarships to be used for tuition at the school of their choice.
2. Congress should abolish the U.S. Department of Education. All funds presently appropriated to the U.S. Department of Education would be allocated to the states to fully fund student scholarships to the amount of $15,240 per student. The remaining $143 billion could be used by the federal government to reduce the federal deficit.

The post If the Medium is the Message, Free Speech Is Dead appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

At a blistering 2021 speed, the screen shifts from archaic interfaces to modern emojis without giving as much as a second to focus before clearing the display for text reading “It’s been 25 years since comprehensive internet regulations were passed. It’s time for an update.” It is part of Facebook’s pro-regulatory advertisement push entitled, “Born in ’96” part of the larger “It’s Time” campaign.

As advertisements go, this one is remarkably effective, if a little overbearing. Would you expect anything less from the king of every corner in the advertising market?

The ecosystem created for the internet in ‘96 by the Communications Decency Act (CDA) has clearly not impeded Facebook’s success. After being created in 2004, Facebook was established in a post-CDA world and has played a leading role in establishing that world’s bounds. Nevertheless, the company’s anxiety over ambiguities in the ancient digital legislation is understandable.

Rather than letting Facebook’s executives design the social media market of the future, what if there were free competition? Not the kind of competition that Twitter and even Parler provide Facebook, rather, a type of decentralized competition that challenges the structure that the Silicon Valley giants are built on. In other words, how about a polycentric organization of competition that makes the CDA obsolete and breaks up vertical monopolies on user-generated content and use data? Thanks to an unexpected source, that competition may not be far away.

To Moderate or Not to Moderate is NOT the Question

Chances are, if you are made uneasy by a social media giant lobbying to change the rules that govern it and its competitors, that dubious feeling may come from a general distrust of Facebook itself. Facebook may or may not have lost your trust after Russia used the platform to target Americans with divisive advertisements during the 2016 election, or after CEO Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to Congress to testify in 2018 about the site’s alleged internal content moderation bias against conservatives. Even without negative associations, however, new regulations on established markets create barriers to entry and disincentivize competition. In this case, new regulations would mandate that social media companies practice internal content moderation—otherwise simply known as moderation—something that has strained Facebook’s abilities up until recently.

At the root of Facebook’s legal issues is the CDA. Although originally intended to determine what content was suitable for television, the CDA became one of the most foundational regulations for the burgeoning internet. Insofar as the internet is concerned, the CDA mandates that a site may not publish certain indecent, and often independently criminal, content. It also delegates the enforcement of these rules to a regulatory agency, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), instead of leaving the justice system to sort out victims and perpetrators. Notably, the CDA also creates a distinction between “publishers,” standard websites that curate or create content, and “platforms” like social media sites that allow anyone to post and merely aggregate and serve content to consumers.

Distorting the justice system by inserting executive agencies between victim and perpetrator creates a topsy-turvy system. As it stands, proving the facilitatory guilt on the part of a social media company is far easier than proving that any crime outside of the scope of the CDA had been committed in the first place.

Under the CDA, there are two systems of online content production. Publishers are obligated to internally moderate content such that it remains within the bounds of what the law considers acceptable speech. On the other hand, platforms are not held to this standard and are, by the nature of the distinction, barred from behaving as publishers. Although this clause, better known simply as “section 230,” has been touted by many as the saving grace of the CDA from the perspective of free speech, it is also the wedge that causes Facebook to take flack from both the left and right.

Facebook has been scrutinized for not moderating content strictly enough in 2016 and for being too politically restrictive ever since. New regulations would certainly clear up Facebook’s role, especially if Facebook’s on-staff legal team would have a say in the verbiage of any proposed bill, which it likely would. Either way, moderation of user-generated media, and therefore free speech online, will either be centralized under a federal agency or only distributed between a few massive companies which themselves have nothing to do with content production.

The free market provided several alternatives to Facebook and Twitter but few gained traction in the face of such established competitors and steep regulatory obligations. One of these start-ups, Parler, managed to gain a healthy following when President Donald Trump was controversially removed from almost every other online platform following the storming of the Capitol on Jan 6. After gaining millions of users overnight, Parler’s web-hosting service, a subsidiary of Amazon, decided to sever ties with the company over its moderation policy. This effectively moderated the entire website off of the internet by refusing to do business with them.

Many were attracted to Parler’s moderation policies, or lack thereof, and, had it not been shut down, the site would have posed a competitive threat for a portion of Facebook’s disaffected user base. Although providing a place for truly unfettered conversation, Parler segmented conversation and would never be a comfortable place for the majority of social media users who prefer some community standards beyond the legal bare minimum to be enforced.

Besides, having a second, slightly edgier public square just outside the first is not a substitution for effective public discourse. The French third estate’s self-separation from the estates general did not, after all, create a more healthy political dialogue for the French people during the beginning of the French Revolution.

Parler was shuttered for two months while the site’s founders procured alternative web hosting services. Although currently functional, Parler’s existence is not a long-term competitive solution to the problem of legally obligatory moderation because it frames moderation, in and of itself, as a bad thing. The same could be said for President Donald Trump’s new media outlet if it is ever opened up to public contribution.

Moderation, when done offline, is a daily practice for most. Whether by choosing the members of your inner circle or choosing to only have two slices of pizza, people self-moderate their lives all the time. Centrally planned moderation, however, is called prohibition and often causes more harm than good.

Enter the Decentralized Social Media (DSM) model, a polycentric model of online interaction recently proposed on Medium by Ross Ulbricht, the currently imprisoned founder of Silk Road, an infamous illicit online marketplace that jump-started the popularity of Bitcoin in the early 2000s.

The Innovation of Decentralized Social Media

Moderation of something as big as social media is incredibly difficult and would take a massive amount of manpower if done entirely manually. Some of Facebook’s most closely guarded secrets determine the algorithms the company has developed for use in ad targeting and to facilitate moderation. The CDA both disallows this moderation and requires it, depending on which side of Section 230 a site falls on.

To oversimplify, Ulbricht’s DSM model would remove those automatic and manual moderation tools from under the hood of a social media’s servers and place those same processes in the device of the social media user under the control of separate companies that stand to profit from providing moderation and aggregation services at the discretion of the device owner. Users could access any or all of the web’s available social media content feeds at once and only be fed content within their own acceptable parameters while retaining ownership of their user data. All of this would be done through the operant function of Bitcoin, the encrypted blockchain.

In practice, the seemingly small distinction between where these algorithms are processed and who owns those functions resolves several of the questions raised and created by the CDA without having to create or pass any new laws.

Where the CDA consolidates and centralizes the responsibility for moderation under the content aggregator’s purview, start-up companies following Ulbricht’s model would compete to moderate and aggregate both user content and advertisements from social media platforms, thereby creating a market where there previously was only mandate.

Users would simply open an app wherein social media content is centralized. Users could pick and choose moderation and aggregation providers to reward with a portion of the advertisement revenue that their engagement latently generates and freely switch between providers.

Rather than having aggregation and moderation be centralized by legal obligation to a few social media companies, levels of moderation, advertisement service, and content prioritization would all be separate overlapping markets which independently compete to provide superior service and control for negative externalities.

Algorithmic moderation is a powerful tool that, along with manual moderation, can create comfortable digital environments. If moderation and aggregation were divorced from the social media platform and made a competitive marketplace, users would be free to use whatever network or combination of networks that they preferred and have the content they are served moderated however they see fit. If users could be in control of the moderation they facilitate and are subject to, the arrangement would be considerably more consensual. Social media companies under a decentralized model would not be held responsible for users misusing their digital infrastructure as content regulation would be the responsibility of the client-side moderation algorithm and the companies that compete to provide those services most effectively. If a user was ever dissatisfied with the moderation they were provided those would have market remedies.

Should someone use social media as a means to harass or threaten another, there would be no intermediate party at fault, freeing the judicial system to bring justice to guilty and affected parties alike.

Side-effects may include

Besides sidestepping the CDA’s ineffectual regulations, a DSM would protect the privacy of users by encrypting the user generated data used by moderation algorithms and keeping a function of that unique data as the user’s encryption key or proof of identity.

The value of the advertising market and the size of Facebook’s share of it are both due to the incredible amount of data that Google, Facebook, and other companies collect on every person who uses their services. This information is the company’s to sell, use to target ads, or train algorithms with. Under a DSM model, that information would be yours to sell and distribute among service providers.

The value of this information is worth much more than the emotional value of privacy. Companies like Facebook make much of their money in one way or another from the accuracy and scope of their user data collection. If that information were to become yours by using a DSM, so too would the money it generates.

As it stands, Facebook and Google data-mine users in exchange for a service. Were they to have to adapt to a DSM model, companies like this would need to shift to more traditional models where payment is offered directly for a service rendered. Ulbricht’s model would allow businesses to accommodate liquid payment between service providers like web-hosts or advertisers and the users so that the app constantly allows users to be in control of how much of their data they would like to share and how much usability they want to pay for by receiving ads.

Innovation always trumps regulation

Rather than offering prescription for what ails the social media marketplace, Ulbricht’s paper is a prediction from a prison cell. The unstoppable march of innovation is sure to further segment the digital marketplace for social programs into intricately specialized niches. The distributed social media model is merely a description of how those businesses and technologies would need to operate.

Because Ulbricht was not granted the clemency from the Trump administration that he so hoped for, the infamous programmer will not be the one to found the moderation or content aggregation start-ups that he describes. Public figures such as Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and Tim Pool have all claimed to be creating platforms that in some way aggregate social media, beginning the process of decentralizing—or polycentrizing—the social media market. It remains to be seen if these or any start-ups will truly realize Ulbricht’s ideas, but if the CDA is not soon updated, it will likely be circumvented.

Just as 3D printers have shown several gun laws to be archaic, if not entirely obsolete, the best way to counter a bad set of laws or regulations is to create a technology or idea that renders it pointless. Ulbricht may not be the one to lead the charge, but his simple Medium post certainly opened a door.

Gavin Hanson (born in ’96) is the Editor-in-Chief of Catalyst

Published with permission from Catalyst. Read the original article here.

The post Regulation, Moderation, and Social Media Decentralization appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Two questions must be answered:

1. Can private parties controlling the public square, deprive citizens of their right to free speech?
2. Can Congress empower private parties to regulate competitors?

Congress spectacularly muddled section 230 and the U.S. Supreme Court has not addressed it. Fortunately, decades-old Supreme Court cases involving the tech giants of yesteryear, i.e., coal companies, railroads, and company towns, provide guidance on the limits of big tech’s power to regulate the public square.

What does section 230 do?

Section 230 has two primary provisions. The first exempts internet providers from civil liability for publishing any information from another content provider that is objectionable. The second provision exempts Big Tech from liability when it takes voluntary, good faith actions, to restrict objectionable materials or provides the technical means to restrict them.

Private parties cannot deprive unpopular citizens of constitutional rights when governing the public square

By granting Big Tech immunity from civil liability when restricting material from the Internet it deemed objectionable, Congress encouraged and indirectly authorized private parties to regulate speech.  Congress has no constitutional power to authorize private parties to deprive, even unpopular citizens, of their constitutional rights. Moreover, when private parties control the new public square, they function as a government and must provide constitutional rights for all.

These principles are set out in Marsh v. Alabama, (1946). Marsh, a privately owned town, made it illegal for persons to distribute religious literature on its sidewalks. Since the town functioned like any other community having speech and commerce, citizens in the town had the same rights as if in a municipal town. When private parties wield great power over the public’s use of town services, the powers of the private parties are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those using the town. Private property rights are not sufficient to justify restricting fundamental liberties.

Since the First Amendment severely limits governments’ power to regulate political speech, the government cannot grant private parties, functioning as a government, more power than it has. If Congress desires to impose speech limitations on the Internet, it must do so directly, by government regulation that protects the constitutional rights of citizens.

Congress cannot grant private parties the right to regulate competitors

By refusing to sell Parler’s app, and by denying Parler’s access to cloud storage, Google, Apple, and AWS, private parties, relying on a congressional grant of civil immunity, took, in essence, regulatory actions to put another private company out of business. Congress has no constitutional authority to authorize, or foster conduct by private parties, that allows them to regulate other businesses. This has been the law since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decided Carter v. Carter Coal, (1936).  

In Carter, Congress delegated to coal producers and miners the power to impose standards on other producers and miners.  Carter held a private entity “…may not be entrusted with the power to regulate the business of another, and especially a competitor. Any statute which attempts to confer such power undertakes an intolerable and unconstitutional interference with personal liberty and private property. The delegation is so clearly arbitrary, and … a denial of…due process…”

By granting immunity from liability to big tech for restricting materials Big Tech deems objectionable, Congress is sanctioning the regulation of private parties by other private parties, an action it has no constitutional authority to authorize. Regulating competition is the responsibility of the government.

The principles in Carter were upheld by the DC Circuit as recently as 2013 in American Assn of Railroads v.US DOT (reversed on other grounds).

Section 230 immunity from suit encourages Big Tech to assume the regulatory functions of government by regulating the rights of other businesses to speak and compete in the public square. The Constitution does not give Congress or private parties this power.

The post Opinion: Section 230 is an Unconstitutional Delegation of Power to Big Tech appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

We can add Section 230 to that list, an obscure provision of the Communications and Decency Act (1996) that was previously unknown to most.

Section 230 is a frequent target of President Trump’s ire, and as such it can now frequently be found trending on Twitter, being debated in Congress, and featured in primetime media coverage. All in all, dozens of bills to repeal or modify Section 230 have been introduced in 2020.

TechDirt journalist Mike Masnick writes, “If you were in a coma for the past 12 months, just came out of it, and had to figure out what had happened in the last year or so solely based on new bills introduced in Congress, you would likely come to the conclusion that Section 230 was the world’s greatest priority and the biggest, most pressing issue in the entire freaking universe.”

But while it is a recurring topic of discussion, it seems the incessant chatter has only left Americans more confused. This explainer is here to break down the code and the debate swirling around it.

What Is Section 230?

So what’s the truth about Section 230? What does it actually say and what are its implications? Fortunately, the original author of the bill, Senator Ron Wyden, is still around and on record when it comes to the current dispute.

“Republican Congressman Chris Cox and I wrote Section 230 in 1996 to give up-and-coming tech companies a sword and a shield, and to foster free speech and innovation online. Essentially, 230 says that users, not the website that hosts their content, are the ones responsible for what they post, whether on Facebook or in the comments section of a news article. That’s what I call the shield.”

“But it also gave companies a sword so that they can take down offensive content, lies and slime — the stuff that may be protected by the First Amendment but that most people do not want to experience online. And so they are free to take down white supremacist content or flag tweets that glorify violence (as Twitter did with President Trump’s recent tweet) without fear of being sued for bias or even of having their site shut down. Section 230 gives the executive branch no leeway to do either.”

It can seem complicated, but it’s actually fairly straightforward. Section 230 simply says that only internet users are responsible for what they write, not the private companies whose websites host the commenters. Secondly, it affirms what the First Amendment already implies—that private companies don’t have to host speech that violates their values.

Section 230 was written early on in the internet age, long before social media companies even existed (although much of this debate has focused on those platforms). Within the bill, the authors explicitly say the law is “to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services.”

And it has been successful. The government got out of the way and the internet expanded rapidly. Private companies invested millions to build their online enterprises, encouraged by provisions like Section 230 that secured their rights against unjust legal charges that would have otherwise put those investments in severe jeopardy.

Online companies want and need internet users to interact with their content and share feedback on their platforms. That goes for publishers (like Vox.com and us here at FEE.org), platforms (like Twitter and YouTube), and everything in between. But they shouldn’t be held liable because someone writes something untrue on their pages, nor should they have to host content that they find offensive.

Ronald Reagan once said,“We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”

Individuals should be held accountable when they break the law or violate the rights of others. But it would be morally wrong to hold society at large, or even parts of society like private businesses, responsible for the action of an autonomous individual. In fact, this course of action would let the party actually responsible for harm off the hook while punishing a third party who did nothing wrong.

Shoshana Weissmann, the head of Digital Media and Fellow at the R Street Institute, recently wrote a punchy (and hilarious) article illustrating this concept—tying Section 230’s protections to Jeffrey Toobin’s Zoom “reveal” earlier this year. For those who’ve forgotten, Toobin accidentally exposed himself on a work Zoom call. As Weissmann points out, without Section 230, Zoom itself would have been liable for his lewd content rather than Toobin being held responsible.

Thankfully, we have Section 230 which creates a just and sensible legal apparatus for the internet and conduct on it. Without this protection, it is highly unlikely that the internet would have taken off and grown to its current state, much less produced the social media websites, online news outlets, and other user-reviewed services (like Yelp) we all now enjoy.

What Do Both Sides Want To Do About It?

Section 230 became a hot topic in the fall of 2019 when President Donald Trump drafted an executive order requiring the Federal Communications Commission to develop rules that would limit its protections. Ultimately, that order never went through, as even the mention of it was met with confusion and alarm by regulators, legal experts, and First Amendment advocates.

The storm died down until May of this year when Twitter found itself in Trump’s crosshairs after slapping one of his tweets with a violence warning. This feud reignited Trump’s fury and determination to do away with Section 230.

Since then, Trump and his allies have regularly called for the repeal of Section 230. Trump believes that social media companies are unfair to him and his agenda, and his response to that is to use the government to force the private companies to act in a way he deems appropriate. He also believes that doing away with Section 230 would block social media companies from “censoring” information on their websites.

There has, of course, been pushback against all this. Many conservatives and libertarians have pointed out that Trump and his supporters fundamentally misunderstand the legal code and its implications. Supporters of Section 230 say it upholds the right to free speech in the age of the internet, and that it protects the free market as well.

Meanwhile, others like Republican Senator Roger Wicker have called for modifications to the law that would leave the liability shield in place, but that would force companies to host content that may violate their values.

Social media companies, who have incurred the bulk of the derision in this debate, are left between a rock and a hard place. Democratic leaders want them to censor more and guard against “fake news,” while some Republicans want to take away their rights for any content moderation.

True defenders of free speech, limited government, and the free market are largely being drowned out by the tidal wave of politicians and their supporters pushing for big government responses to a societal issue they dislike.

What Would Happen If It Was Repealed?

While opponents of Section 230 think that its removal would force companies to host their content and not “censor” information the company does not like, it would, in fact, have the opposite effect. If companies were liable for content posted on their pages by third parties, they would instead have to censor vigorously.

We’ve already seen a preview of what this would look like with the passage of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTRA). Signed into law in April of 2018, FOSTRA carved out an exception to Section 230 that essentially said websites would be held responsible for content promoting or facilitating sex trafficking or prostitution.

Internet companies reacted quickly, even those whose primary purpose had nothing to do with sex work. Craigslist removed its personals section altogether. Reddit and Google also took down parts of their websites. Notably, these actions were not taken because these sections of their websites promoted prostitution, but rather because policing them against the possibility that someone else might advertise illegal services was an impossible task.

It is almost inevitable that further eroding Section 230 would have similar impacts throughout the internet. Consider, for example, a company like Twitter. If it could potentially be sued for the millions of user posts on its platform, it would have to start censoring many more of them, or even running them through a pre-approval process. This would likely slow down the flow of information on these channels as the companies would be forced to sort through and approve content. Ultimately, these actions would result in all of us having less of a public square, fewer information streams, and a less rich internet experience.

Especially concerning is the impact these actions would have on smaller companies and start-ups, many of whom cannot afford losing liability protections. Ironically, those who seek to harm Facebook or Twitter by repealing this law would actually end up entrenching their power even more by putting their competitors out of business.

Take Parler for example. It is a growing, popular competitor of Twitter’s that many conservatives are flocking to. Should Section 230 be repealed, this new company would almost certainly be put out of business tomorrow as it does not yet have the revenue to withstand litigation. Twitter, on the other hand, would have the resources to survive and adapt.

“If Section 230 were to be repealed, or even watered down, this next generation of platform will likely be thwarted by liability threats. “Big tech” firms have the resources to comply with new mandates and regulations, so erecting this barrier to entry to nascent firms will artificially lock currently dominant firms in their lead positions.”

-An open letter to Congress from a coalition of conservative and libertarian think orgs, including Americans for Prosperity, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Freedomworks, and more

What If It Was Modified?

Some bills seek to modify Section 230 instead of repealing it. There are too many to name in one article, so we’ll focus on the worst and the most prominent: Senator Josh Hawley’s “Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act.”

This legislation would remove liability protections for companies with more than 30 million US users, 300 million global users, or $500 million in annual revenue. The bill also says that these large companies can apply for immunity from the bill if they go through a process that allows the FTC to screen their protocols and attest that their algorithms and content removal policies do not discriminate on the basis of political views.

So Hawley wants to fight “censorship” with – wait for it – actual government censorship of private companies.

Real censorship almost always involves the government, because without this tool of force, it is unlikely information could be totally suppressed. While people like to call social media content moderation “censorship” it really isn’t, not in the true sense of the word. Those who have their posts removed from one platform can easily go post them elsewhere. But what Hawley wants to do, which is use the government to censor the protocols of private companies, actually does constitute censorship as it would force them to allow the government to dictate what speech they would (or would not) host on their websites.

The notion that it would ever be wise to give the government this kind of power is quite jarring to encounter in America. It’s easy to see how this system would quickly eviscerate our fundamental rights to free speech by allowing the government to determine what belongs in the public square of discourse.

And, it’s important to remember that Biden appointees will soon be running these departments. This is an important reminder that the government bureaucrats who decide what counts as “neutral” will not be picked by your team forever. It would be prudent to stop giving the government more power that will only one day be used against you when your “team” is no longer in charge.

What’s next? Will they call to nationalize these platforms? This approach is antithetical to the ideals of limited government, free markets, and free speech.

“This bill forces platforms to make an impossible choice: either host reprehensible, but First Amendment protected speech, or lose legal protections that allow them to moderate illegal content like human trafficking and violent extremism,” said Michael Beckerman, president and CEO of the Internet Association.“That shouldn’t be a tradeoff.”

Myths About Section 230

While many seem to think that Section 230 makes a distinction between ideological publishers and neutral platforms, and that companies who act as publishers do not enjoy its protections, this isn’t true. Section 230 applies to all internet companies and makes no such distinction between publishers and platforms.

Section (c.) of Section 230 specifically addresses this point and speaks to the protection of companies who block and screen offensive material. It immediately states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. It goes on to say that when it comes to matters of civil liability, “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lews, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”

Publishers can be sued for defamatory language online, just as they can be sued for it in print. So can Twitter or Facebook, if they issue a statement or a post. But that isn’t a relevant scenario to Section 230, which again, merely maintains websites are not liable for content you may choose to write on their pages.

Removing content they find offensive is well within their First Amendment rights, and within their Section 230 rights. It doesn’t change their status as a company or their protections under the law.

Many advocates for repealing Section 230 have hung their cases on the “publisher vs. platform” argument in an attempt to mislead their followers. But the good news is, Section 230 is relatively short. You can literally read it in less than five minutes for yourself and see that the publisher vs. platform discussion is a non-issue.

There are also those who claim that Section 230 is a special protection or an exemption for social media companies. This argument also fails to hold water.

One of the few, legitimate functions of government is to uphold the rights of individuals; when that is done businesses have a secure and just climate to operate within. That is exactly what Section 230 did. When the internet came about, it opened up an entirely new marketplace and one that needed such rights affirmed in order for people to invest in it.

Section 230 merely applied the same types of laws we see in the tangible world to the online marketplace. Would Burger King be liable if you came in and shouted obscenities at their customers? Should they be forced to host you on their premises and allow your attack on their clients to continue? Of course not. The same rules should apply to an internet company, and thanks to Section 230 they do.

Furthermore, without this provision to protect an online free market, the courts would likely be bogged down with frivolous lawsuits, which would cost taxpayers dearly. Even sorting through and throwing out such suits is an expensive and time-consuming process.

The Right Way To Handle Social Media Bias

On this issue, those who believe in limited government and free markets need to put their principles over short-term political expediency. Individuals, whether acting alone or jointly through a business, have the right to free speech, meaning the government has no right to tell them what they can or cannot say. While we may disagree with their choices to remove some users or throttle access to certain content (and I do), it would be a violation of their fundamental rights to force them to host speech they disagree with.

This argument is akin to one that caught the attention of many conservatives years ago: The Christian baker, Jack Phillips, who famously refused to bake a custom cake for a same-sex wedding citing his free speech rights. Just as the baker had a First Amendment right to not endorse a message that violated his beliefs, so too do the owners of social media companies. If we dislike the ways in which they run their platforms, the proper solution is for us to create or fund their competitors—not use big government as a weapon to tread on them.

This is the beauty of the free market. We don’t need the federal government to get involved in this picture outside of creating a fair legal apparatus in which companies can flourish. With Section 230 they got this right, and consumers now enjoy a wide range of options online thanks to its provisions.

If users are unhappy with Twitter or Facebook, they can take their business elsewhere and vote with their feet. If enough users do that, Twitter and Facebook will willingly change their policies to attract users back, or they will cease to exist.

Some have noted that the network effect makes it difficult for social media competitors to attract new customers, referring to the fact that for some products users find more enjoyment in them when a large number of their peers partake in the experience. But MySpace used to have the network effect advantage, and it still lost out to upstart competitors. And the recent (and impressive) success of Parler shows that there is still room for competition in this picture.

As always, free people are far better equipped to solve this problem than the government.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post What Is Section 230 and Why Does Trump Want to Repeal It? appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

How, in a country that has a Bill of Rights claiming we have Free Speech and Freedom of Press in the First Amendment, are speech and press so controlled?

The goal isn’t to tell the truth or make sure everyone on the internet is honest. The goal is to manipulate people into believing the narrative of these organizations. For example, Snopes, one of the most popular “fact-checkers”, is run by a prostitute and an idiot. They do no research, but people will read the headlines back to you like it’s a universal truth. “SEE, SNOPES SAID IT’S FAKE.” What does this do? Well, it just manipulates idiots that want their opinions repeated back to them via a website.

We’re at a point where it’s not just edgy people pushing uncomfortable posts being censored by these supposed “fact-checkers”. It’s memes and posts I see from grandparents, mothers, daughters, etc.. And anything that makes fun of the Left or Democrats. If it makes fun of Trump or Republicans, no one cares if it’s negative or misleading. But as soon as you point out Joe Biden or Kamala Harris flaws, the internet dweeb army of fact-checkers take over your post. Blur your post. And have 75 links underneath it calling whoever posted the meme a liar.

I’m sure we all have our personal censorship war stories at this time, but it’s hard for me to take companies seriously that violate several amendments with their “terms of service” and violate the Sherman anti-trust act, use slave labor, and other inhumane, crazy things. They’re trying to be the word police online and people love it—typically because it aligns with their own uninformed opinions and penchant for being wrong.

It feels good for ignorant people to feel smart without actually having to do the work to be smart. Why read an article to educate yourself, or learn and grow in any way when your narrative can be supported by regurgitating a headline back to people? It’s too much work to do any research, so why not just pretend with Snopes and all the other “fact-checkers”? You can stay dumb and feel smart. Win-win!

Anthony Rogers is an artist, professional tourist, and entrepreneur. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

The post [Opinion] FACT CHECK: Most Online “Fact Checks” are Propaganda appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Shumate: For our readers at The Libertarian Republic who don’t know about your personal crusade against pedophiles, can you tell us what started this whole thing and how you became known as a pedo-hunter?

SLG: Certainly. People who prey on children are the lowest form of human—if they can even be called that. My sort of “awakening” to the problem on Facebook began when a “Libertarian” named Sean Windingland went on Facebook Live to prove a disgusting point about “age of consent” where he obtained his young daughter’s consent to touch each other sexually. Apparently this wasn’t just proving some point. He had gaslit her into giving permission to be molested. Sean was sentenced to many years behind bars. Some pedos only get off with one year, and I have no idea why. It went from that to shaming people who argued philosophically that children can consent.

Then, later on I started going after groups. This was an off and on thing as they popped up. Recently, with the death of Mary Kay Letourneau, we got to see a little bit of the double standard, where child rape was essentially romanticized because the offender was a woman. But it also seemed like her death sort of opened the 9th Circle of Pedo Hell. There’s been group after group springing up right here on Facebook, to procure buyers for images of child porn.

Shumate: My awareness of your desire to expose the evils of pedophiles on Facebook came when you did a piece on Cecil Ince the Former Vice Chair of the Missouri LP—fantastic work by the way—how long would you say you have been in the business of exposing pedophiles’ evil on Facebook?

SLG: March of 2019. That’s when the Sean Windingland incident occurred. Some people had philosophically come to his defense. I took them to town. I shared screenshots of their justifications for child abuse based on their belief that a child could consent to any such thing. This resulted in people disassociating from such bad actors.

Shumate: To that point, what would you say to the people, self-professed Libertarians in particular, who say that sex between an adult and a minor is morally acceptable as long as consent is acquired?

SLG: I would say that children are not capable of making such decisions, especially with potentially harmful consequences, whether physical, psychological, or financial. All of those are potential factors.

Regarding consent, not just in my state but in many states, mutual combat is legal. If two people consent to a fight in front of the cops, the cops cannot actually intervene. Of course, this doesn’t apply to adult vs minor. Should I be allowed to fight a 10-year-old if they agree to it? After all, most 10 year olds have more experience fighting than they do with sex. And I happen to be the polar opposite. Much more experience with sex than with fighting. If the question was really about consent, then this shouldn’t be a problem for those folks who believe a child can consent. So issue isn’t really about consent—it’s people who want to prey on children for sex.

Shumate: Many Libertarians talk a lot about the non-aggression principle. There could be a very strong case that pedophilia violates the NAP, so why do you think so many pedos are being exposed in supposedly libertarian circles lately?

SLG: I think there are a number of people who want to have philosophical arguments and choose a very poor hill to die on. Somehow they view themselves as intelligent or scholarly, making these uncivilized arguments. They may reference some “historical” tradition of some third world culture to justify their claims. I say that the term “historically” isn’t a very good qualifier for many things.

Some people argue it doesn’t violate the NAP. I argue it does. But then again, as Austin Petersen noted, neglecting your child or starving them doesn’t technically violate the NAP as it is not an act of proactive aggression. And this is why he always said the NAP is imperfect. Yet many Libertarians have since interpreted the NAP to mean that parental responsibility is required. I believe part of that parental responsibility is feeding your kids and not molesting them. And protecting them from molesters. And anyone who tries to sleep with a child is violating that.

But it’s still not an argument I’m very interested in, because this is one of those areas –  I simply don’t care about the NAP. I believe pedophiles will need to answer to God. It will be a very uncomfortable conversation. And I’m in favor of expediting that meeting.

Shumate: Your crusade has gotten you quite a bit of attention lately, both good and bad including a Facebook group of your allies in this cause and people attempting to get you banned from the platform can you speak to that controversy?

SLG: I have several friends that are aiding me in this cause. Some of the groups I find and call for mass reporting I find on my own. Others are sent into my inbox by others who know I have the traction. And they don’t want any of the potential retaliation associated with being the original poster, and are content with sharing my posts. So I have built a little bit of a network for getting this stuff out there. And it seems like it takes forever for Facebook to unpublish some of these groups. The worst I’ve seen here on Facebook was a group that shared PG-13 photos of children, where the photo caption was a serial number. In other words, the PG-13 photo was the cover photo of a set. And everything else in the set is exactly what you think it is. It took nearly 24 hours of mass reporting this group to shut them down. And when Facebook unpublishes a group, they still archive everything. In other words, it “freezes” all the photos and comments on their end. So it would be much more in their favor to do this, but it feels like pulling teeth with them.

Yet, despite the many screenshots I see from friends who receive messages back from their reports that the page “doesn’t violate community standards,” they were quick to freeze my account because someone reported my name as being fictional. Facebook nuked my account, and I’m currently awaiting for them to review my ID to bring it back. And yes, it was pretty clearly retaliation for my posts exposing pedophiles.

Shumate: It certainly appears that Facebook is at the very least tolerant of pedophilia, wouldn’t you say?

SLG: Facebook claims that they remove 99.5% of pedophilia groups and content. Yet, we manage to find a gigantic amount of that supposed 0.5%. So there are two conclusions that could be drawn from this. Either pedophilia has hit relative mainstream, which I doubt. Or Facebook is much more tolerant than they claim to be. And with as long as it takes to remove a group, receiving messages that they don’t violate community standards, my bet is that they’re tolerant.

Shumate: Given your current circumstances verifying the authenticity of your account, will this affect your activity on the platform or deter your mission in any way?

SLG: I think if my real name is used, it may prove as a little bit of a deterrent for me, just like having my name listed in Japanese phonetics was a little bit of a deterrent to being doxxed. Though Facebook only requires that you use a name you are called in real life, as opposed to your legal name which is what they seem to expect of me. And with my wife being Japanese and my kids being half, and being immersed in our local Japanese community, in real life I am often called by how my name phonetically sounds in Japanese. So yes, we are approaching a discrimination issue, as their conclusion would be that those people are not valid people.

Shumate: Will you push this if Facebook challenges your authentication?

SLG: I think I may if they force me to use my Anglicized name. I don’t think it would be a good look for them. And it would give a larger platform to explain how this all came about, giving Facebook more uncomfortable questions to answer.

Shumate: So it’s a pretty safe bet Squiggly Line Guy isn’t going to stop any time soon I suppose?

SLG: Squiggly Line Guy is forever.

Shumate: Is there anything you’d like to say in closing to your fans, to those who wish to sexually abuse children, and to Mark Zuckerberg and the people at Facebook about pedophilia being allowed on the platform?

SLG: Absolutely. To those who have reported the pages I’ve shared, and shared my posts— your reach extends my reach by light years. And I’m thankful for you.

To pedophiles or pedo sympathizers— while I do not believe electroshock therapy can alter a valid sexuality, I believe it can cure pedophilia if the voltage is high enough.

I don’t have anything to say to Zuckerberg. In fact, I should probably keep my mouth shut from here on out if Facebook forces me to Anglicize my name, and consider any possible recourse. I’ll plead The fifth on that for now.

Shumate: Thank you for sitting down with me, Squiggs, and may God be with you on your righteous endeavor.

We are indebted to the liberty movement’s favorite pedo-hunter Squiggly Line Guy, and it’s safe to say he will not rest until Facebook is purged of sexual crimes against children.

You can follow Squiggly Line Guy on Twitter @GuySquiggs.

The post The Liberty Movement’s Pedo Hunter appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Unfortunately, it has once again resurfaced as a supposedly viable tactic of internet harassment. An ethically abhorrent behavior, it uses fear tactics, often in an attempt to silence someone and especially in political contexts.

Recently, it was used by Disney child actor (now “full grown” adult) Skai Jackson to persecute teenagers (upcoming high school freshmen) for edgy Instagram content—as well as others behaving against her personal code of conduct on social media. Although not posting addresses, the Hollywood star wasn’t afraid to wield her followers like a cudgel when posting the names, handles, schools of attendance, and phone numbers of anyone who she deemed as behaving in a racist manner.

Now, we can argue the matter of whether or not the posts of these teenage boys were racist (they really weren’t), but there is no room for doing what she did, which was posting these boys’ phone numbers, names, and high school to her over half a million Twitter followers. If we are to discuss matters of societal double standards, it should be noted this behavior has been dealt with by the media with a divided reporting standard, with one side calling it doxxing and the other simply saying she was “putting racists on blast” so to speak—notably Cosmopolitan, Entertainment Tonight, and The Blast. I’m certain these places would be just as ecstatic if the roles were reversed.

The act of doxxing is a morally objectionable thing to undertake for a multitude of reasons. First, it is an attack on someone based on what is vigilante ‘justice’ by all accounts. Up until recently, this was a generally maligned behavior by the progressive left. It’s the mob coming together on social media to decide on a whim who ought to face punitive measures that are entirely socially enforced, lacking any judicial procedure or due process. This is not how a civil society operates.

Second, it also deprives us of the ability to openly view what is necessary to have in open dialogue. There is no worse place for an opinion to lie than in the shadows of a person’s mind, lest they deprive humanity of crucial dialectic discussion. As John Stuart Mill once put it, “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

Although I do find racism deplorable (a shockingly controversial opinion I am sure), I will not say that it has no place in the open marketplace of ideas;—if for no other reason than to forever cement the importance and moral justness of tolerance and unity. There is no worse way to fight racism than to suppress the people who otherwise hold those opinions, as keeping them well illuminated is necessary. As the old saying goes, keep your friends close and enemies closer (and there’s no greater enemy to liberty and freedom than blind bigotry).

It has also supposedly been used to silence those who would be found as creepy in select YouTube communities, chiefly as a way to rout out toxic “stans” in CallMeCarson’s fanbase. Although stan culture is a problem deserving of its own essay (and is covered very well in this Weest video), the reality is that it is not anyone’s call let alone the correct one to dox these individuals. At present, evidence of such is very limited, and thus I cannot definitively say that it has occurred. I think this tweet summarized the issue quite poignantly.

This kind of glorified hacktivism only works to further divide people against one another and strikes needless fear into the hearts of what are merely online malcontents. It should be noted that CallMeCarson has made it clear that this behavior is unacceptable, and has generally been outspoken against targeting any individuals for any reason…ever!

And the fear is hardly unwarranted, as with doxxing can come the dangerous practice of swatting, which actually resulted in a man being killed in Kansas and the perpetrator behind bars for 20 years. The reality is that there is a real slippery slope to suffering which is lacking any fallacious regard, and it remains to be seen whether the slide is just beginning or grinding to a halt.

The post Do We Really Have to Say It? Doxxing is Not Okay appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

I’m not one to knock an expert when they are right or someone who may be an entertainer but can provide some damn compelling evidence (looking at you Adam Conover). But the reality for those who reach media acclaim through traditional media or the age of internet opinion opining is that their input isn’t that great or even useful.

Of course, that won’t stop new media cropping up from reporting on the latest new takes in what can only be described as Scarce with less personality. The drama click will be generated from getting the hottest new gaming, political, or social commentary takes from the foremost in the community. Given that new media stars, especially those on Twitch where directly livestreaming their lives and opinions is practically in the job description, these inputs are easily accessible and oftentimes these things will be directly farmed from their livestream content.

To illuminate the issue, I will use someone whom I will admit has a respectable talent for swaying appeal, and who outmaneuvered what should have been a career-ending infidelity case. The great Dr. Disrespect, the two-time champion who has done so much, was the subject of articles… on his opinions about the Coronavirus? Whether I agree with the man’s opinion or not, the point remains that this is not an expert opinion, and it’s laughable given the current media issues with listening to medical experts.

Furthermore, there is a common trend of pieces on these ‘influencers’ opinions on other social matters (or just drama). Now, on the other hand there are articles that are germane to the activities of these digital bards. Articles discussing their stances and thoughts on game mechanics, input on the quality of games overall—even commenting in a constructively critical manner on the behavior of fellow community pillars. These are all examples in which this kind of media is perfectly legitimate. There are no experts like the players putting in the hours so people will flock to watch them.

But what of the legitimacy of a voice? I, for one, am just some 22 year old punk with an attitude and a bunch of opinions. That is true. But what is also true is that these brash political stances and media opinions do at least come from a verifiable background and continuing education, much as these entertainers are growing experts in their own fresh fields. With sourcing is the reality that not every analysis needs to be expert if it is at least educated. One example can be seen with the advanced levels of analysis of creators like Veritas, who extensively utilize the scientific method and further sound study methods to better their content.

This isn’t to diminish the achievements of these people in any way. In many regards, there is not questions that they outpace my own. All that is meant to be adressed is the greater concern in continued weighing of celebrity opinion as valuable. The following video is just one example of the kind of mass media campaigning the highest level stars of today use to try and adjust the world to their liking—implications be damned.

This kind of behavior, which seeks to undermine the so-called governance system they supposedly cherish, is unacceptable. At present, there is no comparable level of sneering insincerity. At the very least, many of these creators are regular Joe’s like the rest of us (except for maybe that one awkward Angry one). As time goes on, this will be less and less the case as more success stories develop and the upper crust mirrors that of a RiceGum video. Even now this developing issue can be seen in the actions of some of the aforementioned top tier, like that of Ethan Klein’s behavior.

The road ahead is one which must be tread carefully, and in which a more considerate approach to relevant reporting may need to be adopted. In doing so, by keeping appropriate matters to appropriate voices we can lessen the noise of the battle for clarity of fact. Not to say one can’t know the right answer from time to time, but a Fortnite streamer hasn’t won a Nobel Peace Prize – yet (though many have won a ton of awesome cash prizes).

The post Internet Influencers: An Opinion About Opinions Nobody Asks For appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

But Twitter is private property. It is a company with physical resources — computer servers and buildings — and, above all, intellectual capital — in the form of computer coding that powers this marvelous communications platform. All of it belongs to its shareholders, who are its owners, including its founder, Jack Dorsey, who owns 13% of the firm.

The terms of use of Twitter are set by its owners, in much the same way that you can set your terms of interaction with a guest in your house. If that guest abuses you, or threatens to shut down your house or burn it down, you can kick him out, or even call the police to protect your property right.

The right of free speech is an aspect of one’s right to property.

Communist governments understood this. In Poland, before its liberation from communism in 1989, and before the Internet era liberated communication from its dependence on newsprint, the Communist Party controlled speech by controlling the access to newsprint. When the Solidarity protest movement gained traction in the 1980s, the dictator of Poland, Wojciech Jaruzelski, tried to stop their message from getting out by preventing Solidarity from getting access to the paper it needed to print its leaflets, posters, and newspapers.

The rulers of the Soviet Union understood this, too. Photocopiers were a highly guarded technology, whose access was strictly controlled. And just to get a typewriter, one needed a special license from the government, which would not be granted if your loyalty to the state was even slightly in doubt. Surprisingly, even a typewriter was a tool of subversion because it could be used to create samizdat, which were typewritten copies of illegal books.

The idea was that if you received one of these typewritten books, you had to type out a new copy so that you would pass on two copies, your original and one more. This was a laborious process, but it was successful in helping to bring down the Soviet Union by multiplying the circulation of banned books such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which described the Soviet Union’s system of gulag prison camps.

The principle here is that the right of free speech is a right possessed by individuals and it is exercised through their privately owned property. The American Founding Fathers understood this when they named it in the Bill of Rights to the Constitution as one of the individual rights that the state could not abridge.

It is this right of Americans that our president undermines when he attacks Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, each of whom he has threatened in particular ways. He is threatening antitrust actions against all these companies because he does not like their speech. He is threatening to raise postal rates to torment Amazon, the owner of the Washington Post. He calls out the executives who run these media platforms and denounces them regularly.

And now he has explicitly declared his intention to hobble Twitter using the resources of the government or shut it down completely.

A question that must be asked by any lover of freedom is, “If the owners of a media platform do not get to decide who can appear on it, then who gets to make that decision?”

To ask that question is to answer it. If private owners do not get to decide the terms by which customers use its media platform, the only party left is the Communist Party (in the case of Communist Poland and the Soviet Union) or the president and his representatives, in the case of the United States.

There is no magical “third party” that can act as “impartial umpire” to make sure that your favorite commentators get the billing they deserve on your preferred media platform. The choice is simple and it is stark: Either the owners decide or the government decides.

Now, you may be fine with that if the government is one that you approve of, but what if a new regime wins the next election, as it most certainly will, if not in 2020, then in 2024 or in 2028? Have you (those of you who approve of Trump’s threat against Twitter) thought about how the future president may use the new authority to censor that President Trump will have created for him, if he makes good on his threats against Twitter?

Imagine that world, because it will be the world of a new dictatorship, and one which has emerged in the United States, the country whose Founders authored the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, which protects the right of free speech.

Freedom of speech is a right possessed by individuals, whether alone or working together in corporations, and is exercised through their ownership of a means of speaking, or access to a means of speaking that they have gained through voluntary agreement with its owner. If someone wants to express an opinion on the New York Times, one can write a letter that gets accepted by its editor, or become a reporter there, or buy the paper from its owners (as Jeff Bezos did with the owners of the Washington Post), or start up one’s own media platform.

But the Internet gives everyone a much greater ability to have their independent voices heard than has ever before existed in human history. One can start a blog (as I once did) or write for independent think tanks, such as the American Institute for Economic Research, or self-publish books on the Internet. None of these things require access to a typewriter, let alone a trove of newsprint, a burden that the courageous anti-communist freedom fighters labored under to overthrow communism.

Today, the cost of disseminating one’s opinions is nearly zero. All one has to do is get out there and create and disseminate one’s opinions. If you lament that the intellectual climate is not one that you approve of, don’t call for censorship. Don’t let the government fight your battles. It will only backfire and you will wake up in that future dystopia that you supposedly fear.

Fight those ideas with better ideas. If you lament that the Left is winning, fight them with better ideas. If you are incapable of doing so, letting President Trump use the police power of the government to do this for you is self-contradictory. Government force will not achieve freedom. It will only achieve tyranny.

This is a lesson not just for President Trump’s supporters on the Right. The disconcerting state of today’s culture is that both the Left and the Right are attacking the tech media platforms. Both are attacking them because they want their own speech featured in a way that they approve of and/or they want opposing speech that they disapprove of silenced or reduced in volume.

Both sides of the political spectrum want to seize control of the engines of free thought — the media platforms — in order to convert them into mouthpieces that support their agendas. This is a very disturbing development in American history.

President Trump — and your supporters — lay off Twitter, and the other tech media platforms. All politicians of every political party should stop attacking the media and declare their support for the First Amendment, just as these politicians once did:

“If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.” ~ George Washington, First U.S. President, Founding Father

“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” ~ Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of Independence, Founding Father

Washington, Jefferson, and the other Founders fought a revolution so that this principle could be enshrined in our Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” ~ First Amendment, the Bill of Rights, United States Constitution

This article is republished with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

Image: video screenshot

The post Free Speech Is Not Just Partisan Speech with Which You Agree appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Had Biden selected a woman as his running mate? Nope—or not yet at least. The Libertarian Party, after a long and contentious online convention lasting 4 rounds of ballots, nominated Jo Jorgensen for President. 

In their announcement, they state:

“Jorgensen holds a doctorate in industrial/organizational psychology from Clemson University where she teaches. A native of Grayslake, Illinois, Jorgensen is a wife, mother and grandmother currently living in Greenville, South Carolina.”

However, not all were celebrating. Some very angry Leftists were not at all thrilled that #ImWithHer was being used for a candidate other than Hillary Clinton.

Here I’ve mined some of the saltiest Tweets from triggered Leftists.

The post Leftists Triggered: #ImWithHer Trending After LP Nominates Jo Jorgensen appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.