Censorship a weapon in hands of Big Tech as Twitter cuts off Trump
Trump s permanent suspension may well be supportable from a national security point of view, if these companies, in concert with US law enforcement, have credible evidence of further political violence. Yet the co-ordinated movement of these companies and their swift removal of Trump s presence on the internet has chilled observers around the globe.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a combative leftist , decried the move by tech companies. I don t like censorship, he told reporters. I don t like anyone to be censored and for them to have their right taken away to send a message on Twitter or on Facebook.
Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was poisoned with nerve agent just last year, has made the observation that this precedent will be exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech around the world , and that of course, Twitter is a private company, but we have seen many examples in Russia and China of such private companies becoming the state s best friends and the enablers when it comes to censorship .
Doubtless this will all be justified by alleging there was some sinister right wing conspiracy in the offing that had to be stopped. But any such conspiracy could be handled by more conventional methods — like having the police actually do their jobs. Instead we get a massive and genuinely chilling crack down on free speech. Sure, some violent plotting is no doubt being disrupted. But the idea of a free society is that you put up with a certain amount of dangerous activity in order to get the benefits of freedom. These bans are very bad and if liberals fail to see that, they ain’t really liberals.