free speech for me but not for thee appears to be the message being sent here;
A letter sent to Twitter's top 20 advertisers, signed by 40 activist organizations, including the NAACP, the Center for American Progress, GLAAD and the Global Project Against Hate and extremism, contained the following veiled threat:
"We, the undersigned organizations call on you to notify Musk and publicly commit that you will cease all advertising on Twitter globally if he follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards, including gutting content moderation."
This means that Musk must not roll back what Twitter has on the books now, and commit to enforcing the existing rules. In other words, Twitter advertisers have been asked to boycott Twitter unless it continues to censor.
Decades ago, during the height of McCarthyism, it was the hard right that demanded censorship, while the left insisted that the marketplace of ideas should be left open to all forms of speech.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1801:
"[W]e have nothing to fear from the demoralizing of some if others are left free to demonstrate their errors, and especially the law stands ready to punish the first criminal act produced by false reasoning. These are safer correctives than the conscience of a judge."
Jefferson's distrust of "the conscience of a judge" would probably be even greater if the censors were the CEOs of companies that rely on advertisers for their profits.
At a time of growing division, hostility and violence, it is understandable to look to censorship as the easy solution to a difficult problem. But censorship requires censors, and once censors are given the ability to pick and choose what the public will hear, this slippery slope moves us away from freedom and toward repression.
I certainly do not like the kind of anti-Semitic hate speech that is pervasive on many of today's internet platforms and I am the recipient of these emails and tweets on an almost daily basis. Free speech is not free. The old expression that "sticks and stone may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is false. Names hurt me, my family and others. But that is not the issue. The issue is whether in an open society we must endure these pains in order to avoid being in even great pains of selective censorship...........more........
