Censorship: Oligarch Media+Social - 2020s Censors More Dangerous Than Anything

[grarpamp]

https://off-guardian.org/2020/11/08/censoring-donald-trump-is-more-dangerous-to-democracy-than-anything-he-could-ever-say/
https://justthenews.com/nation/technology/facebook-deletes-stop-steal-group-enforces-emergency-limiting-protocols-post
https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/world/news/msnbc-stopped-airing-trump-false-victory-speech-after-35-seconds-calling-it-dangerous-while-other-networks-aired-all-15-minutes-of-it/articleshow/79084124.cms


Oligarchs and social media giants are now claiming a monopoly on “the
truth”, that should worry everyone...

The media have called the election for Biden, but the counting goes on
and there is a legal case in the offing. But whoever emerges from this
deluge of sludge, fraud and propaganda to become president of the
United States, there has undoubtedly already been one big loser –
freedom of speech.

Late on Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning, Donald Trump – the
elected President of the United States – emerged from the White House
to make a speech.

He accused the Democratic party, the political establishment, the
media and tech giants/social media companies of working together to
steal the election and put Biden in the Whitehouse.

You likely didn’t see all of it, because most of the mainstream news
channels simply refused to broadcast it. Watch this clip:

Earlier that night, MSNBC had cut away from Trump’s first speech
claiming victory, with anchor Brian Williams claiming it was “not
rooted in reality” and “dangerous”.

Social media companies were doing the same thing. Within hours of it
being set up Facebook deleted a group protesting the election result,
while twitter reduced the President’s timeline to this:

This isn’t about defending Donald Trump, or even agreeing that the
election was rigged (although there is plenty of evidence to suspect
as much). This is about a principle. Donald Trump is the elected head
of state, and he is being denied a platform to address the people he
represents by the faceless servants of corporate media oligarchs.

This is a terrible, terrifyingly awful precedent to set.

The owners of Comcast or Warner Bros or Disney or Facebook or Twitter
are not elected officials. They have no legal authority, and thus no
accountability. Yet they are claiming the right to determine what
elected officials can and cannot say to the people who elected them.

There is a strain of thought that this kind of censorship is
justified. “Spreading disinformation puts lives at risk”, they say.
“If the media stopped people lying we wouldn’t be in this mess” or
“the news should only broadcast the truth!”.

The argument goes that “allowing Donald Trump to “publicly undermine
our democratic institutions will erode the public trust and could lead
to violence.”

But I would argue that empowering billionaires to hold a monopoly on
“the truth” is far more dangerous to democracy than anything Trump
could ever say.

To people inclined to disagree, I leave these five questions. Answer
them, if you can:

    Who made the decision to censor the elected President of the United States?

    Who granted them this power?

    Whose interests do they serve?

    To whom are they accountable?

    In the future, who gets to decide “the truth”?