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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Tucker Carlson. How? Just how???
 
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Liquid Communism
Mar 9, 2004

Dog King posted:

This is old now, but Tucker did a great segment on Musk's acquisition of Twitter:


His main rhetorical point is that free speech definitionally benefits the less powerful more than the powerful, because if you have the ability to abridge someone's speech you have more power than them. I think there's more nuance to it than that because people have different levels of power in different contexts, but Twitter is obviously part of the public square so if you control the limits of speech there you have a significant, possibly even unconstitutional amount of power.

My favorite part is when he talks about how even though the outcome is good, it's bad that we have to rely on Musk to do this because our system is so dysfunctional. It's not oversimplifying the issue like Musk fanboys do.

There is vastly more to it than that, and has been through time. Those with power, and especially wealth, can afford platforms on a scale that no average member of the populace can even really wrap their minds around.
Musk is actually doing a great job of saying the quiet part loudly because he's new money and doesn't have the connections to apply pressure other than throwing cash at it, or the social skills to know when to shut his mouth (as the SEC has demonstrated).

That said, Twitter is not the public square. Twitter is a private entity. The First Amendment doesn't require a private entity to give you a platform or refrain from censoring your speech on their platform. It requires that the government not censor your speech. Unless someone quietly nationalized Twitter in the last six hours, the First Amendment has nothing to do with them.

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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Tucker Carlson. How? Just how???