BearGoggles said:
sycasey said:
BearGoggles said:
sycasey said:
BearGoggles said:
sycasey said:
bear2034 said:
sycasey said:
Those of us who claimed the right-wing focus on "free speech" during the Biden years was completely fake and disingenuous have been proven completely right.
When Democrats censor or curb free speech, they refer to it as "combatting misinformation."
If Biden had done exactly what Trump just did with CBS, you would be posting 20 times a day about it here.
Biden's pressure on social media companies and others attacking so called "misinformation" (which included threats of regulatory action) together with the actions of his FBI and other agencies, were the functional equivalent. Biden's lackeys were literally contacting social media companies to demand censorship of posts and points of view (e.g., covid). Did you criticize any of that?
One difference is that Trump's lawsuits are in public. Everyone sees it and can criticize it on the merits. The public had no visibility as to what Biden was doing.
I agree it is problematic for Trump to bring this type of litigation given his ability to use the force of government as leverage or threaten to do so (which is exactly what Biden did). That being said, he actually had a pretty good case against ABC on the merits (Stephanopoulos' statements were libelous and he was warned not to make them). And I'm hard pressed to explain why CBS edited and then refused to release a full transcript of the Kamala interview . . . though I'm not sure how that's actionable. In both cases, the media companies did not want any discovery to emerge because it would have shown a lot of bias against Trump.
1. I'm not sure why you think actual lawsuits and the active threat of financial penalty for producing media the President disapproves of is better. If anything, that's an escalation on what the Biden people were doing (which per your description, seems to have been just calling people up and suggesting they do things, without any specific named penalty for not doing it?).
2. If you think the Trump administration is not ALSO doing invisible, behind-the-scenes stuff to threaten/control the media, in addition to the big public lawsuits, I've got some swampland to sell you.
1. As I said, its arguably "better" because it is transparent. When Trump filed his lawsuits, we all knew - including his more recent lawsuit against the WSJ/Murdoch (which seems w/o merit). We had no idea what Biden was doing until Musk bought Twitter and it all came out. And even then, Biden and his crew tried to hide/minimize it.
2. Evidence please? For better or worse, Trump has been pretty clear about what his intentions are. And more importantly, it hasn't seemed to change the press coverage of Trump and his admin which remains overwhelmingly biased against him.
It is pretty clear which party is aligned with the old media companies. Biden (and before him, Obama) were given largely a free pass and whereas the press suddenly found Jesus and "principle" when Trump was elected.
Please elucidate the bolded above. What exactly "all came out," and how is it worse than Trump directly using the force of government to mould these media companies into a more favorable position to him?
The twitter files came out which disclosed (among other things) the role of governmental agencies (and NGOs funded by Biden) in censorship. That in turn led to subsequent disclosures of governmental pressure on facebook and other social media companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
The Biden era actions were worse because they occurred behind the scenes and the people who were censored had no notice of the campaign against them. There was no reporting in the press or ability to fight the actions in court - and no political accountability. People and viewpoints were literally deplatformed and throttled by Biden and his cronies. And to be clear - Biden was directly using the force of government to censor - exactly what you accuse Trump of doing.
In the case of Trump's lawsuits - which are bad in the own right - the affected parties, press, and all of society can oppose his actions including at the ballot box. We can sit here and debate the merits of his actions in real time. That was not the case with the Biden admin.
So what form did this "governmental pressure" take? As far as I can tell from the Twitter Files, it was still only "requesting that some things be removed or downgraded by the algorithm" and not direct threats in the form of a lawsuit, withholding of approvals, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I see how that can still be bad and I agree that some things (like the Hunter Biden laptop story) should not have been suppressed. But I still don't see how this is "worse" than Trump making direct threats. I think direct threats are pretty much always worse than vague suggestions.
EDIT: Also, if I'm not mistaken, didn't the majority of the stuff described in the Twitter Files happen when
Donald Trump was President? Whose government was doing the censoring, exactly?
