A study by the Media Research Center found that the social media’s big tech tyrants’ censorship of the true story of Hunter Biden’s laptop that he left at a computer repair shop and the damning information of serious corruption against Joe Biden cost President Trump the election victory in 2020.
And those tech tyrants are protected from liability by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides immunity to the tech tyrants from being sued over things posted on their platforms because they are supposed to be vehicles of free speech. Unlike Publishers who make the determination of what gets posted on their platforms, the social media giants can’t be held liable for what a user posts.
It’s amazing that they still are able to claim the status of a platform when they censor half the country who post things the Democratic Party doesn’t like. And almost every social media platform (not mine) admits to censoring posts because the content doesn’t conform to their radical leftist narratives. Their so-called “community standards” is made up of their radical leftist agenda.
Former President Donald Trump would always talk about removing Section 230 because the tech tyrants are killing free speech. That is probably the only thing I disagreed with Trump, other than not prosecuting Hillary Clinton for her crimes. If they get rid of Section 230, it will only harm the smaller social media sites that are up and coming, trying to bring free speech back to American citizens. The current tech tyrants, Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest, have billions of dollars to keep their cases tied up in the courts for over a decade. The smaller social media companies don’t have that kind of access to the legal system, so they’re the only ones that will get screwed. Instead, they should amend 230 to remove platform status when a platform is clearly acting as a publisher. Don’t hold your breath for the Democrats to do this, because the tech tyrants are censoring conservatives for them.
There is one expert who has an idea that could prove very useful. Have those tech companies make public their algorithms that determine what is censored. They get away with their censorship by hiding behind the esoteric and abstract idea that certain speech violates their community standards. If people can see exactly how they are censoring free speech, it will show they are censoring not for posting “misinformation,” which is their big lie for justifying censorship, but information they simply disagree with politically or it goes against the marching orders of the Democratic Party.
The idea came from Kalev Leetaru, a Media Fellow at Real Clear Politics whose areas of research include trends in news coverage, fact-checking, and social media platforms. He founded the GDELT Project, which claims to monitor “the world’s news media from nearly every corner of every country.”
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL“Section 230 must be amended to require that in return for the liability immunity they enjoy, Internet platforms must make the real-world rules, algorithms, design decisions and management directives that determine what we see each day accessible to policymakers, researchers, the press and the public at large,” Leetaru said.
“Social media’s reach into Americans’ daily lives is too great to leave our understanding of its harms and undue influence to the courage of whistleblowers. A new Section 230 ‘transparency amendment’ would require that social platforms make an array of key datasets publicly available, thus replacing chance leaks with routine disclosure and enabling policymakers to have informed data-driven debates as they seek to chart a regulatory path forward.”
He added that what we have had up until now is a “closed and seemingly capricious system” that needs to be transformed into “a public process — akin to our legal and electoral systems — that can be scrutinized and publicly debated.” Bravo!
Leetaru noted a new report by his foundation that supports his idea of amending Section 230.
He stated the report, “offers a glimpse of what this transparent future might look like, while the full-length research report behind it, Social Media, Digital Censorship & the Future of Democracy, details America’s 2½-century journey to a world in which a handful of unelected billionaires wield near-absolute control over digital speech, with the power to censor citizens and governments alike, arbitrate ‘acceptable speech’ for the entire planet, determine ‘truth’ and even silence the presidency.”
Think about that. Tech tyrants have silenced a duly elected President of the United States [Trump] because he was not a radical leftist.
Leetaru made the point that both sides of the political aisle are starting to understand that increased regulation of social media platforms is needed. In order to fix the problem, he believes Americans need first to understand what the companies are doing and how they are doing it.
“Much as a doctor cannot prescribe a treatment plan for a patient without first diagnosing the specific ailments from which they suffer, meaningful reform of social censorship requires data-driven interventions. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen warned last week that ‘as long as Facebook is operating in the shadows, hiding its [work] from public scrutiny, it is unaccountable.’ The problem, as Haugen notes, is that we lack the most basic data on how social platforms function and their impact on society to be able to understand how we might best regulate them,” he explained.
According to Leetaru, the problem in Section 230 is that it never required the social media companies to give anything in return for ‘near-absolute immunity.’
“States were explicitly barred from narrowing 230’s protections and government was given no oversight role, depriving the American public from influencing or even seeing the rules that govern the digital public square. Most importantly, Section 230 failed to require even the most basic of transparency around how companies wielded its protections,” he said.
This is how millions of American conservatives are getting suspended, banned, or demonetized for posts solely based on their views and without any explanation from the tech tyrants as to why.
“Even mainstream media is not exempt, as Twitter’s ever-changing explanations for banning the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story reinforces,” he said.
“Moreover, Section 230’s reach now extends beyond the web to the physical world, as Facebook arbitrates which protest marches are permissible to promote; Uber and Lyft ban users over their tweets; Airbnb banishes users over their group affiliations; Amazon refuses to publish books it disagrees with; and even Microsoft crafts acceptable use policies for desktop software. Even foreign-owned TikTok banned Donald Trump, as did its U.S. peers, reflecting the increasingly international reach of Silicon Valley’s rules,” he said.
Except for YouTube, every time I have been suspended or hit with a violation over a post, I never got a reason why, and they never responded to my appeals. YouTube does it a different way. They suspend my videos when the topic is in the current news cycle, and then after the cycle has been gone for a few weeks I get a notice from YouTube telling me they made a “mistake” and that my content did not violate their community standards. And the damage was done.
They get support from the Left by pushing the nonsensical idea that speech that doesn’t fit the Left’s narratives is physically and mentally harmful. This is how hilarious memes that are meant to be funny are taken down as “misinformation.” It is also how the Babylon Bee, a conservative satire website, was suspended by the email services site Mailchimp because they sent emails through the service that they pay for, “Violating our standard terms of use and Acceptable Use Policy.” That could mean anything, and it did. The emails contained information they did not allow, which wasn’t illegal and wouldn’t cause harm to anyone.
Section 230 needs to be amended. Think of all the censoring that went on over certain treatments for COVID-19 that the Democrats told the tech tyrants to not allow on their platforms. One such medicine that I can’t mention or this story will be censored is known throughout the world’s medical community to treat COVID-19 patients successfully in about 98% of cases. Because of the tech tyrants censoring that information, millions of human beings died because they didn’t know it was available. Let’s start a hashtag trend: #CensorshipKills.
