Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in an article in The Washington Times on Wednesday (Jan. 13) that false speech censorship by tech giants is the biggest fraud in our society today. He argues that the tech giants’ suppression of conservative free speech has only fueled the rise of alternative conservative social media platforms, but not the “memory gap” into which 74 million Americans have fallen.
A translation of Gingrich’s article follows.
When Twitter and Facebook decided to ban President Trump, censor the New York Post and begin removing other people and organizations from their platforms, they started down a path that will have huge consequences for themselves and for America.
When Google, Amazon and Apple joined and shut down Parler, a conservative social media platform, their actions reached a tipping point, proving that the oligarchy may be seeking to control the public speech of all Americans.
Even the normally anti-conservative American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is sitting up and taking notice. Its senior counsel, Kate Ruane, issued a statement saying that Big Tech’s use of its power to eliminate political speech is a matter of concern for all Americans. She said, “We understand the desire to permanently shut down his [President Trump’s account] now, but it is worth everyone’s concern that companies like Twitter and Facebook have unfettered power to wipe people off a platform that is essential to the speech of billions of people, especially when political realities make those decisions easy. “
Keep in mind that Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Dorsey (who received no votes), have claimed the power to ban President Trump (who received more than 74 million votes) from speaking out. The idea that some billionaire oligarchs can control political discourse in the United States is beginning to cause real concern.
The exclusion of people from the public sphere is inherently dangerous. As President Truman warned, “Once the government pursues the principle of eliminating the voice of the opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is through increasingly repressive measures, which eventually become a source of terror for all citizens and lead to a state in which everyone in the country lives in fear.”
The terrifying concept of managing memory and opinion with technology is expressed in the most human way in George Orwell’s novel “1984”. This novel is about how Western democracy engulfs itself and its citizens in a totalitarian nightmare. The “culture of abolition” and social media erasure campaigns are very much like Orwell’s description of the “memory gap,” where things that the powers that be no longer consider valid are destroyed so that people can no longer use them.
On Jan. 3, 217 House Democrats voted to adopt new House Rules that remove a dozen “inappropriate” gender-specific words such as mother, father, son and daughter. This is another example of the Orwellian model, which once again trains us to consider only “appropriate” ideas and to use “appropriate” language. President Truman’s fears are beginning to become a reality.
Fortunately, the resistance is growing, and it will defeat the left’s control of words, speech and discourse.
For starters, Internet giants are likely to be prosecuted as indirect agents of government power. Some argue that the protections of Section 230 make them indirect agents of the government. The federal Supreme Court has consistently ruled that private companies are bound by the U.S. Constitution as agents of the government.
Blocking free speech violates the guarantee of liberty afforded by the First Amendment to the Constitution, and as a result, those two companies could be fined and punished for violating their clients’ constitutional rights. Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld have prepared the legal groundwork and historical precedent for filing a petition to limit the Internet giant’s constitutional powers.
Second, the nature of Section 230 may be profoundly altered. When it was passed in 1996, it made sense to keep Internet companies safe from lawsuits because it was designed to allow companies that were small and vulnerable at the time to grow. When you’re dealing with giant global institutions with enormous power and wealth, those guarantees no longer make sense.
In addition, they now have the ability to vet content, something they didn’t have at the beginning. Section 230 could be amended to make it a general platform with no power to monitor or prevent participants from posting ideas; or it could be made subject to the same legal liability as newspapers and magazines, against which lawsuits could be filed.
Third, and my favorite approach, conservatives should create their own alternative communication platform so that everyone who disagrees with the left can communicate.
We have done this before. In the 1980s, the news was largely controlled by three relatively liberal companies located in New York City. Then Rush Limbaugh came along. After his great success, hundreds of conservative radio talk show hosts emerged. Today, radio talk shows are overwhelmingly conservative, and it is a solid alternative to traditional media liberalism.
In the early 1990s, CNN and liberals dominated cable news. Then Fox News (Fox News) was founded in 1996. Ironically, the driving force behind the success of Fox News, the network that dominated cable news, was the genius Roger Ailes, who was banished from political circles by the left because they feared and hated him. He eventually fought the left more effectively by creating Fox News.
Now the left is again trying to rig the game, stifle dissent and dictate what we can think, say and believe. Competition will destroy this machine of left-wing groupthink more quickly, decisively and safely than any such time- and energy-consuming effort to regulate or normalize the big Internet giants.
More than 74 million Americans voted for President Trump. At least half of those will be potential users of alternative social media platforms. That would be a market of 37 million Americans. If a small percentage of non-conservatives were to join, it would be a potential market of more than 40 million Americans.
Competition is the best way to defeat monopoly and repression.
I firmly believe that we Americans will reject oligarchy and insist on our right to freedom. We will not be thrown into the “memory gap” by a few rich liberals.
The world is entering a new competition.
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