New Yorkers can breathe easier now — they’re finally rid of the repellent Mayor Bill de Blasio.
But — uh oh — the new mayor, Eric Adams, may be another worm to keep that bitter taste dominant in the Big Apple.
Mayor Adams dislikes guns and violence, so he wants social media to censor rap videos that display and glorify guns. It’s unclear whether he also wants social media to censor links to westerns and Matrix movies and lots of other movies and media in which guns to fight bad guys or bad algorithms are approvingly deployed.
“You have a civic and corporate responsibility,” Adams intones, enjoining social media firms to expand their list of banned things.
“We [we?] pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music displaying of guns, violence. We allow this to stay on the sites.”
“Stagecoach” and a rap video proposing that one “[expletive deleted] that [expletive deleted]” may have little in common in the categories of values and sensibilities. But if violence is “glorified” in both, well, that’s bad. Right?
Adams is a government official. A “public servant.” And a functionary in such a position cannot make solemn, well-publicized declarations about what companies should censor without thereby seeking to enlist them — deputize them, you might say — as agents of government censorship.
He is not sending police to the offices of Twitter and Facebook and ordering them to ban rap-video tweets or else. But he’s doing the next-worst thing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
2 replies on “The Next-Worst Thing”
New boss; same as the old boss.
Violating the Constitution and concurrently one’s oath of office by proxy is like touting lying by omission instead of by commission.