Getting free speech wrong

Ban Nazis but allow kids to see porn? That's crazy

Trumpenfreude is part of your complete breakfast.

On Tuesday, NBC reported, “X's fresh temporary ban of several prominent journalists raises alarm.”

NBC said, “The accounts, which were restored within hours, all have over 75,000 followers and are known to be left-leaning. The temporary bans drove immediate claims of censorship from some X users online, who pointed to past instances in which the platform suspended similar types of users.”

That was a nice admission of lefty bias in the press.

I am not sure why a temporary suspension of 8 journalists is a cause for alarm. NBC did not say what was alarming about the brief interruption in service.

NBC did say, “Musk, who has increasingly embraced conservatives and their messaging, has routinely championed X as a platform for free speech.

“But X has suspended and then reversed the suspensions of other prominent journalists and left-leaning accounts, including CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan and Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell in December 2022.”

By embraced, NBC means ending the permanent suspensions of Catturd and other conservative commentators and snark artists by the previous regime. Those suspensions were deliberate and alarming because they silenced critics and suppressed the existence of Hunter’s laptop, which should have cost Biden the presidency in 2020.

Musk has restored those accounts. That this disappoints NBC is obvious because the network cheered the suspension of President Trump three years ago.

It said then, “Twitter banned the president’s account after years of public pressure and several attempts to limit the reach of his account in recent days. Hundreds of Twitter employees recently signed a letter urging Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to ban the president for using the platform to incite violence in the wake of the Capitol siege. An employee at Twitter who has been pushing for the company to delete the president’s account this week told NBC News that ‘leadership took a beating’ at a meeting Friday morning with employees, many of whom pleaded with executives to delete his account.”

Trumpenfreude hit those protesting employees when Musk bought the service and dumped 80% of the staff. If Twitter had played it straight, Musk would not have bought it and Twitter would still be an overbloated online service providing do-little jobs for thousands of liberals. Oh well.

The press had argued that Trump should be held to the same rules as everyone else because presidents don’t get special treatment. Fair enough, but one of those rules allows users to block critics. The press sued to get unblocked because, they said, a president doesn’t get that privilege.

Two bigger free speech issues involve Nazis and porn. The Atlantic pressured Substack to ban Nazis from disseminating Nazi stuff through its newsletter service.

CNN reported, “Although the platform has explicit guidelines banning content that incites violence, a November article in The Atlantic pointed out at least 16 different newsletters with Nazi symbols, as well as many more supporting far-right extremism, leading to calls for change from many Substack authors and a refusal from leadership.

“A December letter signed by more than 200 of the platform’s authors decried the presence of newsletters pushing Nazi and white nationalist views with thousands of paid subscribers, claiming Substack was allowing this content to exist and profiting off of them.

“Substack takes 10% of profits from paid newsletters.”

Substack resisted in December but capitulated this month. The whole thing gives me a first-they-came-for-the-Nazis vibe, ironic as it is.

Casey Newton of the Substack newsletter Platformer led the charge against the Nazis. Another Substacker — Jesse Signal — called it much ado about nothing, Signal cited a response from Substack’s founder to Newton:

Thank you for the list of publications you sent in for review on Thursday evening.

We have completed an investigation and found that five out of the six publications you reported do indeed violate our existing content guidelines, which prohibit incitements to violence based on protected classes. We have removed those publications from Substack.

None of these publications had paid subscriptions enabled, and they account for about 100 active readers in total.

The response went on and on. They were unpaid newsletters, so Substack made no money off the nutty Nazis.

100 readers?

It reminds me of 1999 when the new Browns team debuted in Cleveland and the KKK sought to hold a rally at City Hall on the day of the debut. Then-Mayor Michael R. White, who is black, said fine. He let the klansmen rally. He allowed them to use the police parking lot to park and to put their robes on, protecting their privacy.

About a dozen people showed up.

Nikki Haley has held larger rallies. I think.

Mayor White was more protective of a rally than CNN. It doxxed a little old lady in Florida for daring to attend a rally for Trump. I am pretty sure that the same right to peaceably assemble that klansmen enjoy applies to Trump supporters.

While the media works to ban newsletters read by 100 Nazis, Florida and other states seek to ban porn peddlers from showing their ware to children.

The Sun Sentinel reported, “Similar bills have met opposition in other states from Big Tech, the adult entertainment industry and civil liberties groups.

“In 2022, Louisiana passed a law requiring adult websites to verify users are at least 18 years old by requiring digitized, state-issued driver’s licenses or other methods. Arkansas is requiring age verification and parental consent for children opening social media accounts.

“Those efforts and similar laws passed in other states are being challenged in the courts.

“Age-verification laws are problematic and introduce constitutional issues by burdening all users with having to prove their age to see legal content, said David Greene, senior staff attorney and civil liberties director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”

Every time? Really? I go to the NYT site and it counts how many visits I make each month and I never signed up for it. I have no problem getting into my password protected sites and if I use a different browser, the sites make me verify.

This is 2024, not the stone ages of 1994. We have cookies now. Microsoft has made it nearly impossible for a person to remove them. Surely the pornographers can place an age verification cookie in your computer — a nookie cookie.

Greene said, “It’s an important right for an adult to be able to use the internet anonymously without their name attached to it.”

That is a water-weak argument to give porn free to kids. We know why the porn industry wants them young. It is for the same reason cigarette companies opposed age verification. Both want to hook them while they are young.

Rolling Stone, which promotes smoking a different weed, said, “First Amendment and internet freedom advocates warn that these laws, framed as common-sense safeguards for children, are in fact part of a broader effort by the Christian right to ban or censor protected speech. Some GOP lawmakers aren’t being shy about it, either. ‘I would love to outlaw it all,’ Arkansas State Sen. Tyler Dees, sponsor of that state’s age law, has said of porn. That attitude is also reflected in conservatives’ sweeping efforts to prohibit drag shows and purge school libraries, which are likewise couched as part of a campaign to shield children from imagined dangers. Vehemently anti-porn organizations including the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which was founded as a religious group and has a history (under its previous name, Morality in Media) of opposing LGBTQ rights, have been instrumental in pushing for age verification on adult websites: NCOSE even drafted some of the language that eventually found its way into the Utah law.”

Oh no. If they succeed in blocking kids from seeing porn, LGBT will be next.

That tells me a lot about what LGBT is all about.

I am with Mayor White on this. Let the klansmen and the Nazis do their thing because they are not harming anyone but themselves. Violent protesters deserve jail times, of course. The rest is just words. Musk seems to be going after scammers, not people on his shit list. Good because I am pretty sure his shit list is long and censoring them would waste too much of his time.

Heck, I will defend CNN’s right to dox little old ladies in Florida.

As for kids, protect them. Always. That means no booze or tattoos until you are 18.

Censorship is an evil temptation. I know. I did it to a few commentators on my old blog and I deeply regret it. Here, I cannot delete comments. That protects me because power corrupts. The power to censor is overwhelming.