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President says broadcasters should lose licenses for criticizing him

(www.nytimes.com)
145 points perihelions | 2 comments | 18 Sep 25 19:54 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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fred_is_fred ◴[18 Sep 25 20:09 UTC] No.45294358[source]▶
What happened to the party of Free Speech absolutism?

Edit: for those claiming this isn't a free speech issue the President is using the FCC to go after people he doesn't like. He must be a special snowflake.

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ordinaryradical ◴[18 Sep 25 20:19 UTC] No.45294483[source]▶
Their speech was never in jeopardy, they just didn’t like its consequences. And now that they have the upper hand they will try to actively impose the same restrictions which they accused others of placing on them.

Victimhood distorts reality and leads to outsized reprisals.

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AlexandrB ◴[18 Sep 25 20:26 UTC] No.45294580[source]▶
> Their speech was never in jeopardy, they just didn’t like its consequences.

Can't you say the same about the Jimmy Kimmel situation? He's not in jail, he's free to speak, his employer just didn't want to back him up on it.

All of the arguments used to excuse cancel culture ("right to speech not to a platform", "it's a company censoring you, not the government", "freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences") are now being leveraged by the right. Why did anyone think it would go any other way? Was the assumption that the left would own the cultural zeitgeist forever? This whole approach to politics was folly.

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krapp ◴[18 Sep 25 20:51 UTC] No.45294866[source]▶
>All of the arguments used to excuse cancel culture ("right to speech not to a platform", "it's a company censoring you, not the government", "freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences") are now being leveraged by the right.

Those arguments are correct though. Free speech doesn't guarantee a platform. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences. The First Amendment does only apply to the government. None of this was controversial until the right decided shitposting their hot takes on black people and the Holocaust was a fundamental human right.

And they're being leveraged by the same right wing that wanted the government to seize control of social media platforms and force them to allow right-wing content and make moderation illegal. And Jimmy Kimmel's firing was due to pressure by the chair of the FCC, which isn't even the context in which those arguments were made and is an obvious violation of the First Amendment

But zing, I guess..

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1. AlexandrB ◴[18 Sep 25 21:05 UTC] No.45295002[source]▶
> because they were being banned for their hot takes on black people and the Holocaust

This was the sales pitch, but it wasn't reality. People were being banned for much less severe speech than this kind of stuff and the window was slowly creeping towards less and less severe disagreements with the dominant narrative. I think bans for COVID stuff were particularly galling for many people[1].

There's a fair argument that the COVID situation was dire and required drastic action, but this can't be papered over in retrospect by saying that only holocaust deniers and racists were being banned.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/2/twitter-to-permanent...

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2. krapp ◴[18 Sep 25 21:09 UTC] No.45295048[source]▶
OK, holocaust deniers, racists and anti-vaxxers. The point is, platforms always had a right to ban people, that was always the deal. And it still isn't the same as actual government oppression of free speech, which is clearly what's happening WRT this Charlie Kirk stuff. Even if you take the most cynical, negative interpretation of the COVID misinformation bans and "Twitter Files" to me this still seems categorically worse.