Free Speech Shuffle

Not since the Nazis attempted to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1978, have so many liberals shown their disdain for free speech as now. The American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) defense of the Nazi’s right to both free speech and freedom of assembly caused many members to withdraw and donations to drop precipitously. Seems people actually, for the most part, support free speech no matter how odious. But there is a large vocal minority who really do want to just shut you up.

I follow Tim Pool of the TimCast Youtube fame. He has talked about the things he can’t say for fear of losing his Youtube page. Every time he mentions Covid for instance, he always says (at least every other sentence) “talk to your doctor”. Because he’s been warned by Youtube that just talking about Covid could get him deplatformed.

Dan Bongino, the radio talk host and Fox News pundit, was just temporarily deplatformed by Youtube for a week. His crime? He said masks were “useless.” An opinion many people share.

And, infamously, the former President, Donald Trump was summarily thrown off of Twitter because he questioned the results of the election. Some would point out that President Trump wanted Ajit Pai, the FCC Chair under his administration, to abandon net neutrality, people intimated he wanted to regulate speech.

But net neutrality had little to do with speech, rather it regulated Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) on how they could treat the “users” of their bandwidth, in other words could they regulate traffic of the gigantic users? (Think Facebook). Under net neutrality rules they couldn’t, which essentially meant that the largest bandwidth hogs (like Facebook) could potentially dominate all internet traffic, leaving little space for other “users” or start-up platforms like Rumble, for instance.

The internet is not a series of tubes, but it has a physical mechanical presence at the “head-end”; whether that’s satellite, cell towers or cable plants. And while that presence is incredibly impressive, it does have a finite amount of space at some point, and this we know because we’ve all seen a traffic caused internet outage at one time or another.

“They shut down the internet” is not just a euphemism, it happens.

Back to free speech. So decouple in your mind the ISP’s and platforms. While one could argue that ISP’s could “censor content” they’re not. The content censors are the platforms. Youtube, Facebook, Tik-Tok, Instagram, etc. The very bastions of liberal, hip, Silicon Valley titans that have used a “plant” to manipulate public opinion. It wasn’t the rail lines themselves (infrastructure) that created the Railroad Barons, it was the companies that used that infrastructure. And it is a “liberal” thought community that is stifling content.

Then along comes President Biden.

He just tacitly, but plainly, called on the platforms to regulate all content dealing with Covid. He called on them to monitor “misinformation.”

If a private company, like Facebook censors content, there’s not a lot you as an individual can do, it’s their platform. But if the government instructs these companies to censor, that’s unconstitutional. Only the government or its directed agents acting on the government’s behalf (Facebook) can violate your civil rights or the Constitution. Why this “police the information” request was so blatantly public, I will never know. But it certainly clears the way for lawsuits on civil liberty violations and in fact makes them even more simple.

It is said that sites like Rumble or Gettr have built their own infrastructure, not relying on third party server farms. We’ll see. And we’ll also see whether the big guy ISP’s will throttle their traffic. That’s deep and probably something they don’t want to step into, but since we, the consumers are all attached to an ISP and Rumble and Gettr aren’t building ISP’s any time soon, it is a possibility.

Free, unfettered information is dependent, of course, on the political leanings of the heads of those cable, phone and satellite companies. We can only hope that President Biden or others in his administration don’t call for the “head ends” to do what he just asked the platforms to do, make sure so-called "misinformation" is not disseminated.