As a friend of ours pointed out to us, it appears that the Leftwing oligarchs who run Silicon Valley, and especially the social media monopolists at Twitter and Facebook, keep trying to censor this Trump video, so it would be a shame if CHQ readers and friends helped spread it and keep it live through the election.
More to the point, where do these self-appointed and self-righteous oligarchs get off censoring the President of the United States? And where is all this pre-election censorship leading?
Or as non-political social media observer John Brandon said in a column for Forbes, “hold on for the ride.”
As Mr. Brandon observed, time and time again, the slippery slope is far from a fallacy. Sometimes, small slips do lead to major slides, and Twitter and Facebook are making tiny steps toward what?
“You will continue to see them make adjustments as we get closer and closer to a volatile election,” digital marketer Matt Ray from ChatterBlast Media, a digital marketing company, told Mr. Brandon. “Facebook and Twitter are not subject to the same rules and regulations as our radio or television airwaves.”
Now, here’s where it gets interesting.
“Social media platforms are becoming more aggressive with the material they are allowing to populate their sites,” Mr. Ray said. “And much more aggressive in their review of that material. They have to. People are angry with them. Facebook and Twitter are owned by publicly-traded companies, and a majority of Americans are concerned with social media's ability to manage divisive speech, fake news, and propaganda.”
Social media platforms are becoming more aggressive with the material they are allowing to populate their sites because a “majority of Americans” don’t like what they see on Facebook and Twitter? How this video could reasonably be characterized as “divisive speech, fake news and propaganda” eludes us.
We find Matt Ray’s claim to be very hard to believe, because it appears he’s claiming a majority of Americans are against free speech – and try as we might, we couldn’t find a poll that confirmed Mr. Ray’s claim.
The best (or perhaps scariest) data we could find shows that large minorities of younger people support the idea of “prohibiting certain speech or expression of viewpoints that are offensive or biased against certain groups of people.”
But that’s not a majority of Americans.
Indeed, when the Washington Post examined the question of social media censorship after a Senate hearing on the topic, one poll that jumped out was this one; “Most Americans (59%) say people should be allowed to express unpopular opinions in public, even those that are deeply offensive to other people,” a 2017 survey by the Cato Institute found. “A substantial minority (40%), however, say government should prevent people from engaging in hate speech against certain groups in public.” However, it is clear that support for censorship skews upward in the younger demographic.
To what extent is difficult to say, concluded the Washington Post. The three polls of young Americans that the Post looked at (from Pew in 2015, Gallup in 2016 and YouGov in 2017) all worded their questions differently and found varying levels of support for the idea of censoring hate speech or statements that offend minorities. At the low end, Gallup found 22 percent support among college students. At the high end, Pew landed on 40 percent among 18- to 34-year-olds.
But that’s a far cry from a “majority of Americans.”
So let’s circle back to that quote from digital marketer Matt Ray from ChatterBlast Media, “Facebook and Twitter are owned by publicly-traded companies, and a majority of Americans are concerned with social media's ability to manage divisive speech, fake news, and propaganda.”
We haven’t been able to find any data that proves or supports Mr. Ray’s assertion that a majority of Americans want social media to manage “divisive speech, fake news, and propaganda.” However, we do find a lot of evidence that large percentages of younger Americans are upset by and do not want to be exposed to views with which they do not agree – especially if those views are characterized as offensive to minorities.
Perhaps Mr. Ray is confusing “lots of young people” with “a majority of Americans.”
Or maybe Facebook and Twitter are merely using snowflake complaints as an excuse to do what they want to do anyway – which is ban President Trump and Trump supporters from using their platforms to communicate and thus influence the election in favor of Joe Biden and the Far Left Democrats.
We’ve viewed this Trump video many times, and we couldn’t find anything offensive in it, or anything that constituted “divisive speech, fake news, and propaganda,” and unlike the social media giants, we want Americans to view it and judge for themselves, so please watch it and forward it to your family, friends, fellow church members, clubs and social networks if you like it too.
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