A major presidential candidate is suing YouTube for censorship.
The candidate’s a Democrat.
That’s right. Democrats can also be muzzled by social media companies … that is, by big corporations that obey the First Amendment-violating instructions of government officials.
Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, for collaborating with the federal government to violate his free speech rights by removing various of his videos from YouTube.
Kennedy’s sins include openly disputing Official Government Doctrines about COVID-19 and the pandemic. Doctrines espoused by, among others, the incumbent he is running against.
The title of the complaint names only “Google LLC” and “YouTube LLC.” But the document makes clear the originating role of the federal government in censoring Kennedy. The complaint is avowedly about “freedom of speech and the extraordinary steps the United States government has taken under the leadership of Joe Biden to silence people it does not want Americans to hear.”
YouTube’s conduct “may be fairly treated as that of government itself,” the filing explains. “For example, although it cited its own COVID vaccine misinformation policies when censoring Mr. Kennedy, the policies rely entirely on government officials to decide what information gets censored.”
The relief that Kennedy seeks includes restoration of the deleted videos and an order declaring Google’s speech-banning misinformation policies to be “unconstitutional on their face.”
Kennedy wants to be able to state his views and distinguish them from the incumbent’s without being routinely censored by the Big-Gov-Google-plex.
Google and other social media companies must somehow be prevented from colluding with politicians and bureaucrats to interfere in the democracy they only pretend to support.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2
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8 replies on “Big-Gov-Google-Plex”
Power is not what you have, but what other people think you have. paraphrasing Alinsky.
Controlling information is the most important step for maintaining that power.
RFK Jr. is not the only candidate being censored.
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As an aside, he has been refused Secret Service protection as a candidate.
Do they want him to join his father and uncle in the annals of history?
Mostly they want to insult and intimidate him. And they can always tell a story in which he is implicitly presented as deserving assassination, perhaps because he was such a “quack”.
You must love ducks! Kennedy is a “quack”.
Must be a relative!
In 1997, the Supreme Court issued a 7 – 2 decision in ACLU v Reno that the censorship provisions in the Communications Decency Act placed an “unacceptably heavy burden on protected speech” that “threaten[ed] to torch a large segment of the Internet community.” The court also wrote that ‘“the interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.”
These ‘private companies’ use public networks. Why shouldn’t all users have equal access?
Calling these networks “public” is like calling society itself (a system of networks) “public”. Going thence to demand that any user provide equal access to all other users entails a confusion of different concepts for which the term “public” is used.
If these social networks had not used misrepresentation to acquire the content that gave market power to them, and if they were not taking direction from the state, they’d be well within their rights to advance social perverse views. But, as it is, they got their social power through fraud and have since subcontracted with the state.
Chester Barnard’s acceptance theory of authority is that all authority is delegated upwards when a designated subordinate accepts a designated person in charge’s right to give orders and to expect compliance. If too many deny the designation of authority then the authority is lost without application of force. And force can only constrain, rather than ensure compliance.
No long-term change will be effected if minions do not fear personal ruin from participating in subcontracted state-censorship.
Alphabet employees should be identified by subpoena and sued. Facebook employees should be identified by subpoena and sued. Twitter employees should be identified by subpoena and sued.