Washington Post employees should vehemently protest their owner and his flagship company for eroding norms of free expression.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon's famous founder and CEO, owns The Washington Post, a news outlet presumably staffed by people with an interest in preserving a culture of free expression given that it makes their journalism possible.
Bezos is allowing Amazon's corporate might to deplatform Ryan T. Anderson, a perfectly mainstream conservative writer who researches transgenderism with nuance and compassion.
Amazon recently yanked Anderson's popular 2018 book "When Harry Became Sally: Responding To The Transgender Movement" from its digital shelves.
As one of the world's most powerful corporations, Amazon is using its power to erode our norms of free expression, narrowing the boundaries of acceptable speech to one side of hotly-contested political debate.
Why does it matter? The free exchange of ideas is how journalists and readers sort fact from fiction, hold powerful people like Bezos to account, and work through good and bad. Corporate executives should not make those decisions for us.
It's not just about precedent, it's about principle, and as a matter of principle, journalists who work for Bezos should oppose and protest Amazon's enforcement of political deplatforming and narrowed speech boundaries.
Wednesday, February 24, 2021
Washington Post Journalists Need To Protest Deplatforming By Jeff Bezos
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