Tame The Social Media Monster!

FREE SPEECH LOST

There is the belief that the Internet in general, and social media in particular, promotes free speech. This is myth! It is well-known that Silicon Valley executives are among the most liberal of people, and are changing the world to their liking through political correctness. Young millennials parrot back ideas espoused by socialist university professors. This has caused a backlash from individuals who see their countries losing their identities and historic values. The backlash sometimes comes in the form of Nazi and white supremacist hate speech, and this in turn “justifies” attempts to suppress anything thought of as hate speech.

True hate speech exists and should be condemned by all sensible people everywhere, but here is the problem: How exactly do you define hate speech? This is not nearly as easy as it seems, because not everyone can agree as to what it is. Much that the illiberal left labels as hate speech is no more than politically incorrect difference of opinion.

Pro-lifers who sincerely believe abortion is murder and speak out for the most vulnerable and defenseless humans are often painted as fascist hate mongers. However, those who fancy themselves as pro-choice and support ripping tiny infants apart and vacuuming them out of their mothers’ wombs are virtually never labelled as members of a “hate group.” If anyone does not like this description of abortion, get over it! Open your eyes, for this is exactly what is done in many cases. Why is it “hate” to tell the truth?

However, due to real hate speech that attempts to stir people to violence, along with fake news and vulgar discourse, it is understandable that there is an outcry for monitoring and deleting such postings on social media and the Internet in general. Google hired 10,000 people in 2017 for this very purpose. Twitter jumped on board to do the same. Fox News reported the following about the move:

The changes announced last month [November 2017] broaden Twitter’s “hateful conduct policy” to permanently suspend any account… that displays “violent threats, multiple slurs, epithets, racist or sexist tropes, incites fear or reduces someone to less than human.”… Hate imagery will now fall under the rubric of Twitter’s “sensitive media policy,” and that will include any “logos, symbols, or images whose purpose is to promote hostility and malice against others based on their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.” And these policies apply “both on and off the platform” (Carbone, Christopher. “Twitter begins purge of far-right accounts as new hate speech rules take effect.” FoxNews.com, December 18, 2017).

Do you see the danger? How will they define “sexist tropes,” inciting fear, or reducing someone to “less than human”? How will they determine what constitutes promoting hostility against religion or sexual orientation? Given political correctness, micro-aggressions, and the ease with which liberal university professors convince students they should feel offended, can we not see where this is headed?

If anyone doubts the illiberal bias and growing censorship of legitimate discourse, consider the case of the PragerU channel on YouTube. PragerU had so many videos blocked on the platform that they filed a lawsuit against Google, the owner of YouTube, in 2017. Anyone familiar with PragerU knows that it violates no Google prohibitions. At the time of this writing, their videos contain no harmful or dangerous content, no nudity, and no sexual material. They have no violent or graphic content. They respect copyright laws, they avoid spam, misleading metadata and scams, and they do nothing to endanger children.

In PragerU’s press release announcing their suit against Google and YouTube, they quote former California Governor Pete Wilson: “This is speech discrimination plain and simple, censorship based entirely on unspecified ideological objection to the message or on the perceived identity and political viewpoint of the speaker” (“PragerU Takes Legal Action Against Google and YouTube for Discrimination,” PragerU.com, 2017).

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