{"id":1401422,"date":"2022-03-26T07:44:57","date_gmt":"2022-03-26T11:44:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1401422"},"modified":"2022-03-26T07:45:04","modified_gmt":"2022-03-26T11:45:04","slug":"if-big-tech-isnt-reigned-in-by-congress-censors-will-eliminate-the-right-from-public-discourse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/if-big-tech-isnt-reigned-in-by-congress-censors-will-eliminate-the-right-from-public-discourse\/","title":{"rendered":"If Big Tech Isn\u2019t Reigned in By Congress, Censors Will Eliminate the Right From Public Discourse"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">32<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fif-big-tech-isnt-reigned-in-by-congress-censors-will-eliminate-the-right-from-public-discourse%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1401422&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Something both convoluted and disturbing happened on Twitter this week that illustrates why it\u2019s not enough for lawmakers in Washington to haul Big Tech executives before congressional committees every now and then and give them a good talking to.<\/p>\n<p>Congress actually has to do something about this. Regulating social media giants like Twitter and Facebook as common carriers, prohibiting them from censoring under the absurd pretext that speech they don\u2019t like is \u201charmful\u201d or \u201cabusive,\u201d would be a good place to start. If that doesn\u2019t happen, Twitter will eventually ban every conservative voice and every media outlet that dares to challenge left-wing pieties about race, gender, and a host of other issues.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s what happened. On Wednesday evening, around the time Twitter\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/03\/23\/twitter-is-censoring-federalist-reporting-as-violent-content\/\">began censoring Federalist articles<\/a>\u00a0by appending a warning they \u201cmay be unsafe\u201d and their contents could be \u201cviolent or misleading,\u201d I got a notice from Twitter support letting me know that someone had complained about a tweet of mine noting that Rachel Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, is a man.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, my tweet would be banned, but only in Germany, where, according to\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/help.twitter.com\/en\/rules-and-policies\/tweet-withheld-by-country\">Twitter\u2019s explanation<\/a>\u00a0of what it calls, \u201ccountry withheld content,\u201d an \u201cauthorized entity\u201d issued a \u201cvalid legal demand\u201d to block my tweet.\u00a0<\/p>\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p>I had written the tweet in response to news this week that Twitter locked the account of Charlie Kirk for saying Levine is a man. Banning Kirk made no sense, I wrote, because Levine \u201cis obviously a man \u2014 a man who dresses like a woman, but a man nonetheless.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To be clear, Levine is a 64-year-old man who spent the first 54 years of his life \u201cpresenting\u201d or living publicly as a man. He was married and fathered two children. In 2011, he decided to \u201ctransition\u201d and began dressing and presenting as a woman, changing his name to Rachel Levine (previously, he went by Richard, his given name). He divorced his wife of 25 years in 2013. <\/p>\n<p>Levine is and will always be a man. His story is a sad one, and far from mocking or berating him, conservatives should pray for him and hope that he gets the help he obviously needs.<\/p>\n<p>But none of this is really about Levine. It\u2019s about Twitter. Twitter locked Kirk\u2019s account after it\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/03\/21\/the-babylon-bees-twitter-resistance-is-a-lesson-in-taking-on-tech-tyrants\/\">locked the account of The Babylon Bee<\/a>\u00a0earlier this week for posting\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/babylonbee.com\/news\/the-babylon-bees-man-of-the-year-is-rachel-levine\">an article<\/a>\u00a0headlined, \u201cThe Babylon Bee\u2019s Man of the Year is Rachel Levine,\u201d riffing on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/storytelling\/grid\/women-of-the-year-2022\/\">an actual USA Today piece<\/a>\u00a0naming Levine as one of its 2022 women of the year, despite the fact that Levine is a man. <\/p>\n<p>After Twitter locked out the Bee, which is a satirical publication, its Editor in Chief Kyle Mann tweeted, \u201cMaybe they\u2019ll let us back into our @TheBabylonBee Twitter account if we throw a few thousand Uighurs in a concentration camp,\u201d which prompted Twitter to lock Mann\u2019s account for \u201chatful conduct.\u201d Later, the Bee\u2019s founder Adam Ford was locked out of Twitter for retweeting Mann.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>While all this was going on, articles at The Federalist suddenly started getting blocked by Twitter. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the handful of articles that were blocked, but it started with\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/03\/23\/everybody-knows-rachel-levine-is-truly-a-man-including-rachel-levine\/\">an article by Libby Emmons<\/a>\u00a0published Wednesday morning entitled, \u201cEverybody Knows Rachel Levine Is Truly A Man, Including Rachel Levine.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full is-resized\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Screen-Shot-2022-03-24-at-9.45.50-PM.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-269633\" width=\"-59\" height=\"-42\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Screen-Shot-2022-03-24-at-9.45.50-PM.png 703w, https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Screen-Shot-2022-03-24-at-9.45.50-PM-300x217-1.png 300w\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p>When my colleague Tristan Justice\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/03\/23\/twitter-is-censoring-federalist-reporting-as-violent-content\/\">asked Twitter about it<\/a>, a spokesperson told him, \u201cthe URLs referenced were mistakenly marked under our unsafe links policy \u2014 this action has been reversed.\u201d Nothing to see here, it was all just a big mistake!\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But we all know it wasn\u2019t. It was no more a mistake than my tweet getting flagged in Germany, of all places, or Kirk and Mann and Ford and the Bee all getting locked out of their accounts. This kind of behavior from social media companies has become all too common for anyone to believe that getting locked out of your account or getting an article taken down is ever a mistake, and certainly not when the tweet or article in question is asserting the plain truth that a man does not become a woman simply by growing his hair out and putting on a skirt. When you\u2019re account is locked over\u00a0<em>that<\/em>, it\u2019s on purpose, and the point is to shut you up.<\/p>\n<p>And it\u2019s not just Twitter. This week, YouTube\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/RepAndyBiggsAZ\/status\/1507089172070551553?s=20&#038;t=Cs3Y0vDv9Z8DFM1A5eSqaQ\">removed a bunch of videos<\/a>\u00a0from the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, including a speech by J.D. Vance and a panel discussion with Federalist CEO Sean Davis, Rachel Bovard, and Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla. \u2014 a panel discussion that happened to be about\u00a0<em>the harms of Big Tech and how federal law protects them from liability<\/em>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"598\" height=\"693\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/BIggs-tweet.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-269631\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/BIggs-tweet.png 598w, https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/BIggs-tweet-259x300-1.png 259w\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p>It\u2019s obvious that these firms will eventually silence everyone who dissents from their woke ideology. They\u2019re not even trying to hide it anymore. If you say that Rachel Levine is a man, or that Lia Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer who just won an NCAA Division I national championship, is a man, they will come after you. It doesn\u2019t matter that Levine and Thomas are in fact men. Truth is no defense against censorship by Big Tech.<\/p>\n<p>So until Congress \u2014 under what would have to be a Republican majority, given Democrats\u2019 enthusiasm for online censorship \u2014  acts to put an end to this, it will continue. And the list of things you can\u2019t say will grow. Before long, you won\u2019t be able to say, for example, that abortion is the taking of a human life, that gay marriage is not the same as marriage between a man and a woman, or that children should not be taught that America is systemically racist.<\/p>\n<p>In such an environment, the only way to ensure the censors don\u2019t come after you is to follow the extraordinary example of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was asked by Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., on Tuesday during the confirmation hearing to define the word \u201cwoman.\u201d Jackson replied, infamously, \u201cI\u2019m not a biologist.\u201d<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<p>\n  John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Something both convoluted and disturbing happened on Twitter this week that illustrates why it\u2019s not enough for lawmakers in Washington to haul Big Tech executives before congressional committees every now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":489,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1401422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/489"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1401422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1401422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1401422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1401422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}