Calling things disinformation is not analogous to deporting people and threatening to withhold funds from colleges that don’t crack down on speech the government doesn’t like hard enough; I’m not claiming there was no civil liberty violated by any previous administration, I am claiming this is a serious escalation of a new kind of attack on the first amendment.
> I’m not claiming there was no civil liberty violated by any previous administration
Well. There you go. We can argue about degrees between the red and blue ties but where would that get us? It's a ratchet. I can point out the many problems of the past administration and you can point them all out in this one, and in 8 years time, it will be worse.
> I am claiming this is a serious escalation of a new kind of attack on the first amendment.
Okay. Did you do anything different last time because of it?
What are you even trying to say? These events are simply not analogous to the events of previous administrations. Please stop trying to reduce it to a partisan debate.
When if ever did the "screeching about disinformation" turn into actual legal or physical threat against Americans or residents?
I generally think this is another of many absurd case of cry bullying, that there's basically no problem here, just that people want to feel bad for themselves & to excuse actual bad acts.
I just don't see that real problem or harm was done to people over disinformation. Meta talked with some people at HHS, and people are flipping their shit that the government talked with social networks, but it seems like a grade a nothingburger from cry bullies, with the big fat 0 of actual interesting claims that the incredibly shallowly obvious manufactured outrage that the Twitter Files amounted to.
If the screeching were actually oppressive you wouldn't have heard the disinformation.
Disappearing people from the streets in broad daylight, on the other hand, will probably have a chilling effect on discussion of the topics they got disappeared over.
My recollection is that the height of the "disinformation" screeching was... the COVID pandemic in 2020 (and subsequently issues around the election itself, in late 2020). Which was while Trump was still president.
Both calling something disinformation and disinformation itself are clearly protected free speech. Especially if the "disinformation" is political in nature.
How do we determine when something is true or disinformation? That's what good faith pro-social and pro-truth people ask. They talk process, principles, and reasons.
I mean, a lot of very smart people told me that you shouldn’t be allowed to say things like “masks don’t work”. They also said hate speech isn’t free speech. Who am I to argue?
Personally I found everything in the article to be ludicrous and to have Jack-all to do with the First Amendment, but I am not very smart.
Withholding federal funds from colleges for not cracking down hard enough on speech the government doesn’t like isn’t related to the first amendment? Or it is but it’s ludicrous?
The 1A is regularly used to decide cases about funding as speech; Rosenberger v. University of Virginia for example forbade U of V from withholding funds from religious news organizations on campus.
I am sure there are arguments that this behavior is within the bounds of the constitution but the 1A definitely applies.
