When I first learned about Parler, my immediate, half-joking, comment was that it would make the FBI’s job easier. To the extent that could be true, some might say this is one rationale to keep the site online. But separate from the efficiency of having putative domestic terrorists gather in a single chat space, many parties have asked whether AWS ...
I guess this is the digital-age equivalent of defenestration: rather than an authoritarian getting thrown out a window, he gets thrown off Twitter. And now that the major platforms have closed the proverbial barn door while the cows run amok on Pennsylvania Avenue, calling the decision to deplatform Trump too little too late is itself saying far too little, and ...
Right after Mark Zuckerberg delivered his 40-minute address at Georgetown University on October 17, articulating his views on the speech right and the role of Facebook, several very good editorials appeared almost immediately. Most recognized the speech for what it was—PR for a corporation by a CEO who has no particular reason to be expounding on constitutional rights or history. ...
It remains a popular talking point among copyright skeptics to say that copyright limits free speech. When this refrain was played a little over a week ago on Twitter by ReCreate’s Joshua Lamel, I responded that those who keep saying it are “hair-splitting to the point of pedantry.” Lamel replied with the assertion that everyone agrees with this trope—all copyright scholars across the spectrum ...
In an op-ed for The Hill published on September 30, Donald Trump, Jr. rails against the power of the major internet platforms, saying that “free speech is under attack” by Big Tech. His complaint, of course, is that the big internet platforms are censoring what he calls conservative voices, blaming “the technology giants that deplatform people at the behest of liberals and then ...
