The New Class Find Free Speech Troublesome, By Charles Taylor (Florida)

The New York Times, globalist paper of unlimited woke, usually has revealing articles, detailing the latest thing upsetting the New Class. Thus, recently, Professor Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia, published a piece expressing alarm at the US Supreme Court's recent decisions that affirmed the robustness of the First Amendment right to free speech.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/opinion/supreme-court-netchoice-free-speech.html

For Professor Wu, the decision reached in the two NetChoice cases, is extremely problematic. The cases involved laws about the ability of social media platforms to remove or moderate content, relating to the censorship of political conservatives. The Supreme Court sent the cases back to the lower courts for factual review, but held that algorithmic decisions made by social media platforms were protected by the First Amendment. The Court saw this extension as a logical development of the understanding of free speech rights for an information age. However, according to Professor Wu:

"The reasoning in the decision in the NetChoice cases marks a new threat to a core function of the state. By presuming that free speech protections apply to a tech company's curation of content, even when that curation involves no human judgment, the Supreme Court weakens the ability of the government to regulate so-called common carriers like railroads and airlines — a traditional state function since medieval times.

Governments have long insisted that certain economic entities serve as common carriers and thus cannot discriminate in the traffic they carry. In the information age, that has led to internet regulation, including the Florida and Texas laws at issue in the NetChoice decision. Such regulation is not always perfect, to be sure, but it is a legitimate tool that democratic governments can use to stand up to private power.

The next phase in this struggle will presumably concern the regulation of artificial intelligence. I fear that the First Amendment will be extended to protect machine speech — at considerable human cost.

In our era, the power of private entities has grown to rival that of nation-states. Most powerful are the Big Tech platforms, which in their cocoonlike encompassing of humanity have grown to control commerce and speech in ways that would make totalitarian states jealous. In a democracy, the people ought to have the right to react to and control such private power, as long as it does not trample on the rights of individuals.

But thanks to the Supreme Court, the First Amendment has become a barrier to the government's ability to do that. Free speech rights have been hijacked to suppress the sovereignty of humans in favor of the power of companies and machines. As Justice Robert Jackson put it in 1949, "If the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."

I could not disagree more. Extending free speech rights serves to create an open democracy, something that the US Democrats, and in Australia, the Labor government, have sought to destroy. Free speech enables transparency of government. And, as for national security issues, if the government is not being involved in corrupt activities, as exposed by WikiLeaks, such as mass murder of innocent citizens, then there is nothing to be afraid of by free speech and open exposure. Only the corrupt in government fear the liberating light of free speech. The entire Covid plandemic, for example, where free speech about a crucial medical situation led to the misery we have today of the vax injured, covered in other articles at the blog, shows why we need more free speech, not less.