The Assault on Free Speech, Continued

The Left’s attack on free speech has many fronts, but two of the most important are Twitter and Facebook, simply because a large portion of political discussion, involving many millions of Americans, takes place on those platforms. As I noted here, our First Amendment gives powerful legal protection to political debate–protection that for now, at least, is acknowledged even by the four Democratic Party Supreme Court justices. (See, e.g., Matal v. Tam.)

Unfortunately, the companies that dominate the internet, like Facebook and Twitter, are run and staffed overwhelmingly by liberals. This means that conservatives are constantly placed at a disadvantage in trying to get their messages out. Almost every day provides new examples. Here are a few for today.

Last night, Twitter suspended Candace Owens, who has 663,000 Twitter followers, for 12 hours on account of an unspecified violation of the platform’s terms and conditions. Maybe it was because Candace tweeted this criticism of Sarah Jeong:


Or maybe it was because she expressed opposition to abortion, noting that it accounts for 61% of African-American deaths. In any event, a large number of Candace’s supporters contacted Twitter to complain, with this result:


There was no way Twitter could sustain the suspension, in view of the hateful trash that is constantly tweeted by leftists like Jeong. But some low-level employee evidently vented his or her hostility toward conservatism by arbitrarily suspending Owens.

Then there is Facebook. Republican Congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng, a highly impressive young woman, nearly upset Democratic Congressman Jim Costa in California’s open primaries in early June, and is now facing him in the general election. If she were a Democrat, she would be getting the sort of rhapsodic press coverage accorded to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Heng’s parents fled Cambodia during the Communist genocide there, and Heng placed a video ad on Facebook that describes her background and explains her motivation for wanting to serve in Congress. It begins with images from the Communist terror in Cambodia. Facebook banned the video.

This is the video. YouTube hasn’t taken it down; not yet, anyway:

And this is Facebook’s notification to Ms. Heng of the ban:

Here is one more: Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not as important as Facebook and Twitter, but I suppose it must be the world’s number one reference source. Christina Sommers tweeted yesterday:


By the way, speaking of the New York Times’s newest editorialist, here is another instance of her demented leftism. She continued promoting the fake news story about the alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia well after it had been debunked:


She will fit right in at the Times!

Silicon Valley liberals will do all they can to help the Democrats recapture Congress in November, and defeat President Trump when he runs for re-election in 2020. Usually they will use out-of-sight algorithms and shadow bans rather than outright, visible censorship. Their political meddling is a vitally important issue.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses