By Buck Sexton
Opinion Contributor
So another social media giant has decided to take action based upon the public outcry over mean speech, this time it’s Twitter.
Up until this point, Twitter had been an outlier, while platforms like Facebook had decided that they were going to do more to prevent nasty things from being said online, they were going to de-platform some of the worst offenders. Twitter had been holding out. They’d been holding the line in favor of more speech, even if that includes some of the nastiest things you would see on the internet.
But then the social justice left got even louder. And now, we’re hearing from Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, that there will, in fact, be changes to the algorithm.
They will make moves now to prevent people from being able to share the worst kinds of thoughts online. Now, look, this is a private company. This is something that they can do. So it’s not a first amendment issue in terms of government restrictions, but there’s also a principal of the first amendment. It involves free speech as a part of a societal norm.
We should be able to share thoughts, even thoughts that are unpopular. Even thoughts that are wrong and destructive.
Twitter doesn’t seem to want to stand up for that idea anymore, and all these social media platforms put together are a raid to be the biggest censorship organization we could have ever imagined. And that’s really troubling.
People who believe in the first amendment should say, “You know what? We’re heading in the wrong direction now.
Does this mean we have to come up with conservative platforms to match the giants of Silicon Valley? Not clear yet.
But it does mean we need a whole lot more transparency and awareness about just how the social media giants are weighing in on one side of the debate or the other.
Buck Sexton is the co-host of “Rising,” Hill.TV’s morning news show.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill.
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