On October 14, a New York Post story presented evidence that Hunter Biden had monetized access to his father, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Within hours of its appearance on the newspaper's website, two of the biggest social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, took steps to suppress the story.
"We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories," a managing editor explained, "And we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions." Similarly, Glenn Reynolds devoted one of his weekly USA Today columns to Facebook and Twitter's efforts to halt the spread of the Post's story on the Bidens.
John Stuart Mill believed that the free and full exchange of ideas not only honors the rights of the people who express them but also enhances the understanding of those who read or hear them.
It is a "Mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society," Georgetown law professor Michael Seidman said in 2018.
Because the United States suffers from too much free speech exercised by too many people, Emily Bazelon of the Yale Law School wrote in the New York Times, our beleaguered democracy is "Drowning in lies."
Their whole business depends on "Network effects." People go to Twitter and Facebook because people go there, which means people will stop going there if people stop going there.
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Unfriending Free Speech
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