Source: It’s Time to Fight for Actual Free Speech
By Amy Westervelt •
…The neat trick a lot of the so-called free speech warriors have been playing recently is to conflate the two and propose that any limits on a corporation, or even basic requirements that, for example, a social media platform take any responsibility whatsoever for the content it publishes, is “censorship.” In this way, fact-checking becomes censorship, labeling of unverified information is censorship, and Europe’s Digital Services Act—which places basic guardrails on digital c0ntent—is definitely censorship. Meanwhile, the assault on the free speech rights of actual citizens is escalating without comment from these self-proclaimed defenders of the First Amendment.
When I asked if he or the other activists who plan to protest had any concerns about police presence at the conference, his response was immediate, “Oh sure, definitely.”
I caught myself thinking, “yeah dumb question, of course they are.” But hello, isn’t that the free speech threat we should be worried about? The actual government suppression of individual citizens’ speech? Two years ago we launched a Drilled series we called “The Real Free Speech Threat.” Since then the criminalization of protest has only intensified, both in the U.S. and beyond.
This week, the Trump administration announced its intention to punish any university allowing “illegal protests” by cutting their federal funding. According to the First Amendment, which Trump’s “originalist” backers claim to be so fond of, there is no such thing as an illegal protest. The government punishing people for speech it doesn’t like is exactly what the First Amendment was written to defend against.
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