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September 4, 2024 - 7:15pm
A 2019 interview featuring Kamala Harris has recently gone viral on X. In it, she made the bold assertion that then-President Donald Trump “has lost his privileges and [his Twitter account] should be taken down”. Harris first voiced this stance during a CNN conversation with Jake Tapper, and reiterated it in a subsequent appeal.
With Harris now running for president in the upcoming November election, questions naturally arise about how her administration might handle free speech, especially concerning platforms such as X, now owned by Elon Musk. If elected, Harris could spearhead initiatives which severely impact Musk’s platform, possibly even leading to a ban or other significant legal actions.
There is already some cause for concern. Recent email revelations from Facebook’s parent company Meta show that Harris’s current deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, at the time White House Director of Digital Strategy in the Biden administration, put pressure on the social media company to remove a Tucker Carlson post related to Covid-19. Similar emails revealed other senior Biden staffers leaning on Facebook to remove Covid-19 posts as well as political reporting, including the New York Post’s October 2020 scoop on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The growing trend of government intervention in social media under the guise of combating “disinformation” is not limited to the United States. Recent events in Brazil serve as a cautionary tale. X has faced increasing pressure from Brazilian authorities for failing to address what they deem to be disinformation, leading to the platform being taken offline temporarily in the country.
This drastic measure highlights the precarious position social media companies find themselves in when governments decide to wield their power against perceived threats to the public narrative. In Brazil, this clampdown is seen by many as an anti-democratic move, with Lula’s Left-wing government potentially using disinformation claims as a cover to suppress dissenting voices which challenge the ruling party’s agenda.
Meanwhile, Pavel Durov, the co-founder and CEO of Telegram, was recently arrested at a French airport. His arrest, which has sent shockwaves through the tech community, is similarly based on accusations related to the spread of disinformation via the Telegram platform.
The subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation raises significant concerns about the future of free speech, especially as it becomes more entwined with political motivations. In Harris’s case, her 2019 statements provide a preview of the aggressive stance she might take against platforms such as X if she ascends to the presidency. She not only advocated for Trump’s removal from Twitter, but also took the extraordinary step of writing directly to then-CEO Jack Dorsey, urging him to suspend Trump’s account permanently. Her call to action did not go unnoticed — Trump’s Twitter account was “permanently suspended” in January 2021 following the Capitol riots, underlining the potential impact of political pressure on social media platforms.
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SubscribeEvery dictator in the history of the world has used public safety as a pretense to censor speech and take away your freedom. That’s what they do.
A Supreme Court case—Jacobson v Massachusetts (1905)—says that the government can enforce vaccines and other things during a public health emergency. It said that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the government. Trying to control disinformation and conspiracies on social media was in an attempt to protect the citizens during an epidemic. Both Zuckerberg and Dorsey volunteered to try and control the disinformation. (The case was about Jacobson’s refusal to get a smallpox vaccine to prevent an epidemic. Eventually, we wiped out smallpox—one of history’s biggest killers—through the cooperation of the American people.)
Why does citing a Supreme Court case concerning public health emergencies get down voted? Strange.
Jacobson v Massachusetts had nothing at all to do with “…trying to control disinformation and conspiracies on social media….”
“Trying to control disinformation and conspiracies on social media was in an attempt to protect the citizens during an epidemic.”
This is why I voted you down. Censorship allowed the govt to control the narrative, which led to policies that caused unnecessary death and hardship.
What you’re saying is wild. You’re saying not only can your government compel you to put something in your body but they can silence you from complaining about it. Is that accurate?
I fear that a Harris victory in 2024 will be a no going back turning point.
She’ll appoint new justices to the Supreme Court, then attack the First Amendment.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Act will be next, which will be mail in only, ballot harvesting. Future elections will be like Venezuela. Democrats in power forever. If you want to know the future, look at California now. Tech feudal ruling class, squeezed middle class, and impoverished working class. Democrat elite lord it over the rest.
I have a horrible feeling that’s exactly how things will turn out. It seems to me that the problem is Democrat voters and the swing voters despise Trump so much that they’ll vote against him, even though they know in their bones exactly what the Democrat party us really about,
“Democrat voters.” Rush Limbaugh made Republicans illiterate with that phrase. Democrat is a noun, not an adjective . You need to use Democratic, which is an adjective.
So I’m lazy. More to the point, I don’t care.
I hope not – because as sure as night follows day the Starmer junta will follow suit.
That is already happening. See the arrests of Richard Medhurst and Sarah Wilkinson under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act.
Let the battle between government and social media /free speech begin. Any government that choses to try and control social media may well come out of this with a bloody nose. It may be a battle that finally puts them in their place and shames them in the process from which they may never recover.
I strongly support the First Amendment, but sometimes I think something has to be done to regulate social media. I just read about a 10-year-old girl who accidentally hung herself. On Tic Tok there is something called “The Blackout Challenge,” where kids block their oxygen supply and blackout. The girl is the sixteenth child under 12 to die. I don’t believe allowing this to continue is free speech.
I remember kids doing that at school, a long time ago. I remember kids doing a lot of weird stuff. Maybe in the past you just didn’t know it was going on. Anyway, you’re playing a game with what I mean by free speech. and you know it. What do you gain from that?
Cackling Communist Cameltoe – God save America from this trollop.
Another round of barons versus the throne
Qell surprise! I see an underground web forming in the not too distant future.
Dictators always shoot themselves in the foot.
It’s as certain as day follows night that Harris’ administration will do everything it can to shut down X. All social media companies are being targeted by governments because although the latter control the MSM (in a way they didn’t forty years ago) they don’t control social media, which is growing in importance. So they will play ducks and drakes with the law (or ignore it) to censor or preferably silence social media.
The “State” is bigger than ever, the “Citizen” is smaller than ever before. Those who vote for Kamala Harris deserve their fate – vassals to the State.
For Hugh Bryant – for some reason my comment did not appear in replying to him about Starmer following suit:
That is already happening. See the arrests of Richard Medhurst and Sarah Wilkinson under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act.
She won’t need to unless Musk really crosses a line. The exodus of advertisers will change how it operates. Already happening.
And where might that line be?