Facebook’s Speech Suppression Argues for Repeal of Section 230 and a Facebook Stock Price of Zero | RealClearPolitics
Then, on May 26, the Biden administration announced it was actively investigating the lab leak hypothesis, meaning that it reversed its shutdown of the inquiry initiated by Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Only after the close of business east of the Rockies did Facebook waddle in (at “3:30 PT”) and announce it would “no longer remove the claim that Covid-19 is man-made or manufactured.”
So, for nearly 16 months, Facebook denied readers information about a serious theory whose exploration might have led to a reduced number of deaths and infections. Nice work, Facebook!
Facebook has been licensed to censor by Section 230 of the 1996 telecommunications act which was intended to, and for some time did, encourage the free flow of information. It does that by relieving websites of liability for information they transmit or refuse to transmit. Facebook’s conduct is in line with liberals’ retreat from their once strong support of free speech, which, as lefty reporter Matt Taibbi writes, “has been abandoned in favor of a politics that embrace making us of technology and extreme market concentration to suppress discussion of whose topics.”
Case in point: last fall’s New York Post story on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, stifled on laughably baseless charges of “Russian disinformation.” Didn’t see that on Facebook, did you?
The commercial result is that Facebook has grabbed advertising dollars that used to go to newspapers, magazine and television and radio. The civil result is that Mark Zuckerberg enjoys what the interwar Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said as the aspiration of Britain’s press lords: “power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.”
Break ’em up into teeny tiny pieces. Just a thought.