FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread

[grarpamp]

Biden communist apparatus appoints anti-freespeech Timothy Wu to
National Council...

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-biden-appointees-troubling-views

"
wu:
the First Amendment must broaden its own reach to encompass new
techniques of speech control
elected branches should be allowed, within reasonable limits, to try
returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed
in the 1950s
these platforms should adopt (or be forced to adopt) norms and
policies traditionally associated with twentieth-century journalism
right that obliges the government to ensure a pristine speech environment
expanding the category of ‘state action’ itself to encompass the
conduct of major speech platforms
"



taibbi:
the intelligence services, whose point of view on this issue is clear
and absolute: they love the bottleneck power of the tech monopolies
and would oppose any effort to dilute it.

Wu’s comment about “returning… to the kind of media environment that
prevailed in the 1950s” is telling. This was a disastrous period in
American media that not only resulted in a historically repressive
atmosphere of conformity, but saw all sorts of glaring social problems
covered up or de-emphasized with relative ease, from Jim Crow laws to
fraudulent propaganda about communist infiltration to overthrows and
assassinations in foreign countries.

The wink-wink arrangement that big media companies had with the
government persisted through the early sixties, and enabled horribly
destructive lies about everything from the Bay of Pigs catastrophe to
the Missile Gap to go mostly unchallenged, for a simple reason: if you
give someone formal or informal power to choke off lies, they
themselves may now lie with impunity. It’s Whac-a-Mole: in an effort
to solve one problem, you create a much bigger one elsewhere,
incentivizing official deceptions.

That 1950s period is attractive to modern politicians because it was a
top-down system. This was the era in which worship of rule by
technocratic experts became common, when the wisdom of the “Best and
the Brightest” was unchallenged. A yearning to return to those times
runs through these new theories about speech, and is prevalent
throughout today’s Washington, a city that seems to think everything
should be run by people with graduate degrees.

Going back to a system of stewardship of the information landscape by
such types isn’t a 21st-century idea. It’s a proven 20th-century
failure, and signing up Silicon Valley for a journey backward in time
won’t make it work any better.