MESSAGE
| DATE | 2021-01-17 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] =?utf-8?q?Freedom_of_Speech_on_the_Internet_-_?=
|
Opinion | The ‘Common Carrier’ Solution to Social-Media Censorship
Tunku Varadarajan
3 minutes
The punitive banishment of Donald Trump from Facebook and Twitter has
met with almost uniform approval from the president’s critics. So has
the decision by Apple and Google to remove Parler, a Twitter alternative
favored by Mr. Trump’s supporters, from their app stores. Many Democrats
see these actions as a righteous and justified silencing, especially in
light of Mr. Trump’s encouraging words for the mob that violently
invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6. Even many of Mr. Trump’s supporters
concede that Twitter and Facebook owe him no platform—that only the
government has a legal obligation to respect the First Amendment.
Richard Epstein takes a different view. The gagging of the president by
America’s digital behemoths provokes in him a mix of indignation and
distress. A professor at the New York University Law School, he is the
foremost libertarian legal scholar in the common-law world. (Mr.
Epstein, 77, directs NYU’s Classical Liberal Institute, where I am a
fellow.) We converse by Zoom, and he says that he’d tell Jack Dorsey and
Mark Zuckerberg of Twitter and Facebook, respectively, to “give Trump
his account back.”
Mr. Epstein envisions the two CEOs as a captive audience: “I’d say to
them, ‘Boys, you’ve got to lighten up. You have to be less confident
that you know the truth about everything. You know you’re doing your job
when you publish stuff on your site that you strongly disagree with, and
not in winning the short-term battle of keeping this, that, or the other
guy out.”
Mr. Epstein describes Mr. Dorsey’s Jan. 13 Twitter thread, in which the
CEO purports to explain the ban on Mr. Trump, as displaying “a rare
combination of hubris and ignorance, proof of how dangerous it is to
have a committed partisan as an ostensible umpire.” Among many
assertions that Mr. Epstein finds “questionable” in the thread is Mr.
Dorsey’s argument that “if folks do not agree with our rules and
enforcement, they can simply go to another Internet service.”
Mr. Epstein emphasizes that he’s been frequently critical of Mr. Trump
and called on the president to resign as early as February 2017: “I
thought his style was so confrontational that you couldn’t keep peace in
the land.” Yet he’s been struck by the “one-sided” nature of the debate
over Mr. Trump’s ban from social media, focusing almost solely on the
First Amendment and how it “applies only to Congress and to the states
and doesn’t apply to private parties.” Largely absent from the debate,
he says, has been the word “monopoly.”
--
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