Guest essay by Eric Worrall
NYT columnist Andrew Marantz thinks allowing free speech is as dangerous as letting ordinary people drive climate destroying automobiles.
Free Speech Is Killing Us
Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?By Andrew Marantz
Mr. Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, is the author of the forthcoming book “Antisocial.”
Oct. 4, 2019There has never been a bright line between word and deed. Yet for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit — along with the consumers obsessed with these products, and the investors who stood to profit from them — tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn’t metastasize into physical violence. In the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Sticks and stones and assault rifles could hurt us, but the internet was surely only a force for progress.
No one believes that anymore. Not after the social-media-fueled campaigns of Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump; not after the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va.; not after the massacres in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a Walmart in a majority-Hispanic part of El Paso. The Christchurch gunman, like so many of his ilk, had spent years on social media trying to advance the cause of white power. But these posts, he eventually decided, were not enough; now it was “time to make a real life effort post.” He murdered 51 people.
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In 1993 and 1994, talk-radio hosts in Rwanda calling for bloodshed helped create the atmosphere that led to genocide. The Clinton administration could have jammed the radio signals and taken those broadcasts off the air, but Pentagon lawyers decided against it, citing free speech. It’s true that the propagandists’ speech would have been curtailed. It’s also possible that a genocide would have been averted.
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Congress could fund, for example, a national campaign to promote news literacy, or it could invest heavily in library programming. It could build a robust public media in the mold of the BBC. It could rethink Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — the rule that essentially allows Facebook and YouTube to get away with (glorification of) murder. If Congress wanted to get really ambitious, it could fund a rival to compete with Facebook or Google, the way the Postal Service competes with FedEx and U.P.S.
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In one of our conversations, Mr. Powell compared harmful speech to carbon pollution: People are allowed to drive cars. But the government can regulate greenhouse emissions, the private sector can transition to renewable energy sources, civic groups can promote public transportation and cities can build sea walls to prepare for rising ocean levels. We could choose to reduce all of that to a simple dictate: Everyone should be allowed to drive a car, and that’s that. But doing so wouldn’t stop the waters from rising around us.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/opinion/sunday/free-speech-social-media-violence.html
I understand the establishment media’s desire for a US version of the British BBC. The British BBC is funded by government sanctioned coercion (see video below – armed police entering a person’s home to back up the employees of a private license fee collection company).
The BBC do not have to produce content which people want to watch, because British people have no choice – if they own a TV and watch live broadcasts in any form, they have to pay the BBC license fee.
So far the BBC has resisted all attempts to make their license fee voluntary.
This attack on free speech, and the demand for coercive government funding of establishment media sources, in my opinion is evidence the establishment media know they are losing the battle for hearts and minds. Only desperate losers want to silence other voices.
Journalistic attention to mass-shooters helps inspire future mass-shooters…but do they shut-up?
“If it bleeds it leads”, no way they self censor.
In all societies, there is a certain ruthless underclass class, the self-selected & self-proclaimed guides of superior merit & wisdom justifying terrorism against enemies real & imagined. They come from both the right and the left – they want to be your (our) masters.
A reasonably civil & equitably society relegates this crowd to the loony bin. Obviously, something is going badly wrong. PC has infected everything to the point that actually having an opinion is dangerous, if not downright seditious.
Millinneals, who started voting in 1998, should have, by now, begun to leave their creative mark on society. Instead, they’re, are relegated to jobs as waiters, doing “gigs” (whatever the hell that is), .com startups entrepreneurs (relatively few of these), and coders for, among other things, dog food sales platforms, taxi companies and other money eating unicorns. Pathetically, or kids haven’t a clue how to be successful.
As this bunch of losers, ok, to be kind, let’s call them “not yet successful children”, flail around, they are fertile ground for “give me free stuff” socialism.
1984…. Deja vu all over again.
Similarly, one NBA coach tweets “Support Freedom. Support Hong Kong.” and the whole damn NBA goes into speech control mode to mollify the freedom crushing Chinese communist government. Craven, spineless maggots….
Ad, it did not have the intended mollifying effect. The Chinese have restricted NBA game transmission.
Lakes like Nyos, Kivu, Congo’ forest hold astronomic quantities of dissolved CO2 and methane.
Equivalent to decades of worldwide emission, sort of speaking in mild words.
CO2 explosions from lakes have already massively killed and this whole system degases in permanence.
Ok, greenies, go and plug it. You want to fight CO2, there you have quite a deal of it.
Why such sources are never mentioned by the climate obsessed retards ? I mean, is that natural CO2 not the same as the other they’re all brainwashed with ? How many CO2’s are here?
It’s just an insanity preaching sect with a very greedy top of food-chain management.
For those of you who eschew Twitter, I’m pleased to report that Marantz is getting ratio’d hard, and there are only a couple hundred likes and retweets.
“NYT columnist Andrew Marantz thinks allowing free speech is as dangerous as letting ordinary people drive climate destroying automobiles”
You mean ORDINARY people are not allowed to buy carbon offsets?
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/09/30/cer/
The opinion expressed by Marantz isn’t really new. It goes back at least to the expression “The pen is mightier than the sword.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pen_is_mightier_than_the_sword
But my twist on it is that the Fourth Estate has become a Fifth Column. Being a double-edged sword, how happy would the MSM be if what they could write was strictly controlled by a group whose politics they disagreed with? Perhaps the best compromise would be penalties for outright lying, and a requirement to give balanced presentations.
Mr. Marantz’s argument is completely abolished by the simple fact that violent crimes in the United States have been declining in recent decades, coinciding with the advent of social media. Telling uniformed, anecdotal stories about social media supposedly promoting violence, when violence overall is declining, is a horrible argument for limiting free speech.
When someone argues that there are too many people on the planet, I suggest they lead by example and voluntarily reduce the population by one. If Mr. Marantz thinks there is too much free speech in the world, then perhaps he should lead by example and shut the fork up! Of course, when these people want to restrict speech or reduce the population, they are talking about others they find undesirable, not themselves.
On the topic of population. Next time you hear someone railing on about the worlds unsustainable population- think about this one. If you took every living human on the planet and dumped them into the state of Texas each person could occupy 1000 square feet with a little room left over. Just some perspective on population size.
Hmmm. Put every human being in Texas. Isn’t that the Democrat plan?
‘The Press’ always appear to ignore that Freedom of the Press is one of five freedoms in the First Amendment. NYT et al could not care less about the other four.
I vote you have to pass an IQ test of at least 95 to be able to write columns for newspapers… That would lead to the dismissal of most of the liberals.
Yes it was Chuck Todd on NBC Meet the Press etc. who won’t allow Climate Contrarians on NBC
– JPP
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/01/02/chuck_todd_im_not_going_to_give_time_to_climate_deniers.html
Couldn’t find it on YouTube …
-JPP
Shame on the NYT. This guys a complete ignoramus. Almost everything he says is bogus. I hope the NYT dies a painful (financial) death. Good riddance.
Here it is – the video doesn’t work very well on my laptop but:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/01/02/chuck_todd_im_not_going_to_give_time_to_climate_deniers.html
it does have the transcript…
So it’s happening here in the USA also NBC is the USA BBC I guess.
– JPP
Allowing freedom of the press is like allowing insane lying jackasses to write down and print up their lies and distribute them all around the world.
Was that sarcasm, or what?
Disallowing press freedom makes us all subservient to the powers that be. It allows TPTB to distribute their lies around the world unhindered.
In the US, the same constitutional amendment that guarantees freedom of speech is the one that grants freedom of the press.
So for the press to impugn free speech is simply inane.
…the communist Democrats are inane, too!
They have become the biggest organized hate group in the US!
The fact a staff member of a prominent currently publishing newspaper could openly come out with the idea, curtailing free speech would be a good thing, tells you everything about how far society has declined. When newspapers, that rely of freedom of the press to publish, start asking for state controlled censorship you realise howe close to the Orwellian nightmare we actually are. We only ever imagined such dystopia existed in fiction or dictatorship regimes, not yet as enlightened as our freedom founded western world.
The other frightening aspect of this piece in the NYT is the idea the BBC is something they would like to copy??
I have one thing to say about the BBC in its defence. It is the organisation that persuaded me to stop watching television news and more recently stop watching television all together. I am looking for a legal option to stop paying the state forced BBC annual licence. That is how unbalanced, and left wing establishment biased, the BBC is. The Frankfurt School’s “Long march through the Institutions” was a generations long project when introduced in the 1930s the BBC was an early target, and became/remains a key promoter of all things left.
Hmm.
From the manifesto of the NZ madman, it’s the Guardian Environment pages that radicalised him.
Is this the NYT trying to attack a direct competitor?
He was NOT a New Zealander. He *IS* an Australian who was living in NZ.
“If Congress wanted to get really ambitious, it could fund a rival to compete with Facebook or Google, the way the Postal Service competes with FedEx and U.P.S.”
Ah, yes. Let’s have another government created black hole to pour our tax money into.
More carbon dioxide and more free speech!
Best two ideas to come along in a long time!
Would they ban the opinions of anyone who agrees with them? Of course not. So why don’t they just come out and say that they want censorship? And who would the censors be? Let me see now …
Incidentally, why didn’t he mention Charlie Hebdo, the Pulse nightclub massacre, the Nice massacre, the Manchester Arena bombing and so many others?
“Mr. Powell compared harmful speech to carbon pollution: People are allowed to drive cars. But the government can regulate greenhouse emissions”
Liberals have the hardest time differentiating between a right and a privilege.
Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty used the print media. Horrors!!!!!
As Newt Gingrich said free speech is offensive speech. There would be no reason to have an amendment to the constitution guaranteeing nice and un-offensive speech. And that is why a free press should also be a competitive and business risk based press giving people a choice.
The Framers of our Constitution put freedom of speech in the First Amendment (rather than the Second or Tenth) because they thought it was extremely important, especially at a time when speech against the British king was punishable by death.
If the holier-than-thou Marantz wants the government to control all communication, he should check the dismal ratings of government-subsidized NPR and PBS. Most Americans prefer listening to or watching something else, when given the choice.
Of course, NPR and PBS do parrot the “liberal” (read socialist) dogma, to the point that the P in their acronyms should stand for Propaganda.
Marantz does have a point that allowing free speech allows “carbon pollution”. Anyone who is speaking exhales CO2, regardless of what they are saying. But silencing them wouldn’t reduce “carbon pollution”, because even silent people still exhale CO2.
The New York Times: All the news that’s fib to print.
“The Framers of our Constitution put freedom of speech in the First Amendment (rather than the Second or Tenth) because they thought it was extremely important, especially at a time when speech against the British king was punishable by death. ”
Nope. There were two amendments included in the original Bill of Rights that preceded what we now know as the First. Those two amendments did not pass and thus what was originally the 3rd Amendment became the 1st by default.
Allowing free speech is too like allowing carbon pollution:
A key factor in the rise of modern, free-ish societies where people routinely live past 40.
they speak the “wisdom” of the tribe!!!