Prickly City by Scott Stantis for October 18, 2023

I’m speechless!

No argument there.

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Free speech has limitations.

Stop lying and calling it free speech.

Why should lying be protected as free speech?

I believe more precisely Hate Speech

Civilized France does not have free speech; denigration towards religious and racial minorities is regulated.

There is “free” speech and then “free from responsibility” speech. Our more conservative elements reserve the latter for themselves alone.

There’s a certain former president who will remain nameless who’s now had 2 gag orders. He whines that his first amendment is being taken away so he can’t threaten er I mean whine about his political enemies

When it comes to criminal defendents like Trump, it is not absolute and subject to order by the court when it threatens the right to a fair trial.

In November, the billionaire Elon Musk purchased Twitter, proclaiming himself a “free speech absolutist,” in defiance of a rather extensive record of retaliating against speech he opposes.

A month later, Musk, citing five tweets that had been deleted at the Biden campaign’s request in October 2020, asked, “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?”

The tweets in question included explicit pictures and video of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter—unambiguous violations of the platform’s standards.

Nevertheless, the Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson called their deletion a “systemic violation of the First Amendment, the largest example of that in modern history.”

There are some problems with this assertion. One is that Twitter is not the government and so is not bound by the First Amendment.

Another is that the Biden campaign was not the government and was also not bound by the First Amendment.

Still another is that there is no constitutional obligation for private actors to host images of a candidate’s son’s pen!s, and indeed, rather than a violation of the First Amendment, the choice not to host such images is itself an exercise of free speech.

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Reconciling that apparent contradiction requires understanding how freedom of speech has been redefined to confer a right to say only what conservatives want you to say.

In this particular case, conservatives are outraged that social-media companies limited the reach of a New York Post story published in 2020, which alleged corruption in Hunter Biden’s commercial deals with foreign firms that implicated then-candidate Joe Biden.

Fearing that the revelations were part of a foreign disinformation campaign, some social-media platforms restricted traffic to the story, or in Twitter’s case, banned sharing of the link altogether, something then-CEO Jack Dorsey later acknowledged was a mistake.

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The Atlantic

Why Conservatives Invented a ‘Right to Post’

If he was around today, conservatives would probably try to ban Mister Rogers.

Fake news Stantis

Republicans feel free to lie constantly.

I hear that Elon Musk is now charging users of “X” for a “right” to “free” speech.

No, no, no, no, let’s not be silly here. Nobody objects to free speech. It’s OTHER PEOPLE’S free speech they object to.

Americans who “oppose free speech” usually do NOT oppose ALL free speech – they prefer to limit speech to what is acceptable to themselves. And by self-justifying that, they do not perceive that they are being hypocritical.

i can have free speech but you can’t

Most of them are from the party of the 74 million.