This nooze item is too crazy to hold off for tomorrow.
Last year Texas passed a law to prevent social media companies from banning users based on their viewpoints. A district judge blocked it. But this week a federal appeals court reinstated the law.
Now for the crazy part. If you can buy this argument… you belong in collidge!
The social media companies claimed it was their free speech to ban other people’s free speech (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/federal-appeals-court-reinstates-texas-law-prohibiting-social-media-companies-banning-users-based-viewpoints/). Like, how can they have free speech if they couldn’t silence speech with which they disagreed? (“My free speech depends on me silencing yours!”)
They put it this way: the law was “banning them from exercising editorial discretion over their private platforms.”
When I was a newspaper editor, there were letters to the editor, and rafts of press releases, that we didn’t publish for a variety of reasons. 1) We simply didn’t have the space to publish everything. 2) Some were so poorly written that we couldn’t figure out precisely what they were trying to say. 3) We didn’t publish crazy-talk.
What we didn’t do was systematically ban everyone whose point of view we disagreed with.
Big Tech has made a habit of banning conservative comment. They have also ruled that any recitation of facts that they don’t want to hear is “misinformation.” They can’t claim, as an actual newspaper can say, that they don’t have the space. My newspaper, The Bayshore Independent, published letters and press releases representing many different points of view, some of which we, the editors, strongly disagreed with. We sometimes interviewed people, and tried to treat them fairly, whose positions we strongly opposed.
“Yeahbut, yeahbut! You ban liberals from your blog!”
But I’ve made my standards clear. I publish no comments from those who personally insult other readers, attack me personally, use profanity, or just waste everybody’s time with a lot of inanity.
Big Tech abuses its editorial discretion. If they didn’t, the Texas law would never have been passed.