His conspiracy-mongering about MSNBC's Joe Scarborough — suggesting the former congressman was somehow involved in the death of an aide — is indefensible.
If only Democrats were offering us a better alternative than Joe Biden.
Alas, a column for another day.
Trump's antics are a conundrum for Twitter. Any other user, one who is not the commander-in-chief, would have been banned. As it stands, Twitter has opted to put "fact check" messages on some of the President's more outrageous tweets.
This has added fuel to the fire of a debate we've been having for a long time: What are the limits of online speech?
"I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online," Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with Fox News. "Private companies probably shouldn't be, especially these platform companies, shouldn't be in the position of doing that."
I tend to agree.
I'm not sure we need to worry as much as we do about online speech.
Whether it's the President's obnoxious and dishonest tweeting, or the reinvigorated flat earth movement, or the anti-vaccination dimwits, or even organized disinformation campaigns with state sponsors like Russia or China, we have more to fear from efforts to regulate online speech than we do from the speech itself.
Besides, social commentators are always getting their skirts up over their heads about this stuff.
It's almost a tradition.
In the 18th century, when novels and commercial publishing were taking off, the scolds of the age were sounding the alarm about "reading addiction" or "reading rage" or even "reading lust," as Frank Furedi wrote in a 2015 article for History Today.
In 1762 the 10th Earl of Pembroke, Henry Herbert, scandalized English society when he left his wife and absconded to the low countries with a young woman named Kitty Hunter. In a sign of those less enlightened times, many of the commentators of the day blamed the scandal on Hunter. What could have led her astray?
"Miss Kitty Hunter was a great lover of French novels..." one society gadfly noted.
We hardly need to go to the 18th century for examples of overreactions over unfettered speech. The 20th century brought us panics over television, multiple genres of music from heavy metal to rap, not to mention violent video games and online pornography.
The scolds told us the unwashed masses needed to be protected from these things or else our kids would grow up to be Satan-worshiping sociopaths.
Somehow, we survived without the censorship they demanded.
We'll survive Trump's tweets without censorship too.
"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence," Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1927.
His words are as correct now as they were then.
To comment on this article, visit www.sayanythingblog.com
Rob Port, founder of SayAnythingBlog.com, is a Forum Communications commentator. Reach him on Twitter at @robport or via email at rport@forumcomm.com.
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May 31, 2020 at 06:00PM
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Port: We have less to fear from online speech than you think - Grand Forks Herald
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