{"id":2855,"date":"2023-06-11T17:53:30","date_gmt":"2023-06-11T22:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ishygddt.xyz\/~blog\/?p=2855"},"modified":"2023-06-15T19:58:51","modified_gmt":"2023-06-16T00:58:51","slug":"seth-dillon-us-congress-2023-03-28","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ishygddt.xyz\/~blog\/2023\/06\/seth-dillon-us-congress-2023-03-28","title":{"rendered":"[DRAFT] Transcript: Babylon Bee congress testimony March 28 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Personally, I think TBB<\/abbr> is dead wrong here, and their opinion is actually dangerous. I\u2019m unconvinced that UGC<\/abbr>-centric websites should or even CAN<\/em> be regulated like a utility. Dillon\u2019s redactive quoting of \u00a7230<\/a> in the closing remark belies bad faith. I\u2019m leaving this post tagged as \u201cdraft\u201d because I haven't properly expressed my thoughts here, but I am archiving Dillon\u2019s statement in full because I had a seriously hard time finding the clip a few weeks ago, and have a sneaking suspicion his statement is destined for the memory-hole. (P.S.: my disagreement with TBB<\/abbr> is not<\/em> a political stance. There are other \u201cright-wing\u201d website operators, such as Andrew Torba, who hold the opposite stance on this<\/a>, who I do agree with. In fact, I have not yet seen any<\/em> \u201cright-wing\u201d operators of UGC<\/abbr>-centric<\/strong> websites \u2014 forums, ActivityPub nodes, etc. \u2014\u00a0 who support reforming \u00a7230; it\u2019s only Republican politicians and other people who have never hosted a UGC<\/abbr>-centric website that seem to think such a reform is either desirable or possible without it devolving into a soup sandwich. (Anyway, \/rant; I'll get on with the transcript.)))<\/p>\n

\n

Transcribed from Forbes, youtube.com\/video\/O4WJbOKQOfM (1:37)<\/a>, adapted slightly for the Web.<\/p>\n

My name is Seth Dillon. I'm the CEO of The Babylon Bee, a popular humor site that satirizes real-world events and public figures.<\/p>\n

Our experience with Big Tech censorship dates back to 2018, when Facebook started working with \u201cfact-checkers\u201d to crack down on the spread of \u201cmisinformation\u201d. We published a headline that read \u201cCNN Purchases Industrial-Size Washing Machine to Spin The News Before Publication\u201d. Snopes rated that story \u201cFalse\u201d, prompting Facebook to threaten us with a permanent ban.<\/p>\n

Since then, our jokes have been repeatedly \u201cfact-checked\u201d, flagged for \u201chate speech\u201d, and removed for \u201cincitement of violence\u201d, resulting in a string of [platform moderation] warnings and a drastic reduction in our reach<\/abbr>. Even our e-mail service has suspended us for spreading \u201charmful misinformation\u201d. We found ourselves taking breaks from writing jokes to go on TV and defend our right to tell them in the first place. That\u2019s an awkward position to be in as humorists in a free society.<\/p>\n

Last year, we made a joke about Rachel Levine, a transgender health admiral [Assistant Secretary for Health] in the Biden administration. USA Today<\/i> had named Levine \u201cWoman of the Year\u201d, so we fired back, in defense of women and sanity, with this satirical headline: \u201cThe Babylon Bee\u2019s Man of the Year is Rachel Levine\u201d. Twitter was not amused. They locked our account for \u201chateful conduct\u201d, and we spent the next eight months in \u201cTwitter jail\u201d [with platform posting privileges revoked]. We learned the hard way that censorship guards the narrative, not the truth. In fact, it guards the narrative at the expense<\/em> of the truth.<\/p>\n

All the more outrageous was Twitter\u2019s lip-service commitment to \u201cfree expression\u201d. Twitter\u2019s mission, they write, is to \u201cgive everyone the power to create and share ideas and information and to express their opinions and beliefs without barriers\u201d. As promising as that sounds, it rings hollow when you consider all the barriers that we \u2014 and so many others \u2014 have encountered. The comedian\u2019s job is to poke holes in the popular narrative. If the popular narrative is off-limits, then comedy itself is off-limits, and that\u2019s basically where we find ourselves today. Our speech is restricted to the point where we can\u2019t even joke<\/em> about the insane ideas that are being imposed on us from the top down. The only reason Twitter is now an exception is [that] the world\u2019s richest man [Elon Musk] took matters into his own hands and \u201cdeclared comedy legal again\u201d. We should all be thankful that he did. The most offensive comedy is harmless when compared with even the most well-intentioned censorship.<\/p>\n

I hope we can all agree that we shouldn\u2019t have to depend on benevolent billionares to safeguard speech; that\u2019s a function of the law. But the law only protects against government censorship; it hasn\u2019t caught up to the fact that the vast majority of public discourse now takes place on private platforms. But where is the law that protects us from [the owners of those platforms]? The lovers of censorship will tell [us] \u201cthere can be no such law; the constitution won\u2019t allow it.\u201d But they\u2019re wrong, and their arguments fail. I only have time to deal with a few of them, very briefly.<\/p>\n

(1) They [claim] \u201cprivate companies are free to do what they want.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s nonsense, especially when applied to companies that serve a critical public function. A transportation service can\u2019t ban passengers based on their viewpoints, nor can telecom providers; under \u201ccommon carrier\u201d [legal] doctrine, they\u2019re required to treat everyone equally. That precedent applies comfortably<\/em> to big tech. The argument that \u201conly the government can be guilty of censorship\u201d falls short, because it fails to make a distinction between the way things are, and the way they should be. If these platforms are \u201cthe modern public square\u201d, as the Supreme Court has described them, then speech rights should be protected there, even if they presently are not. The current state of affairs being what thay are is not a good argument for failing to take action to improve them. But, beyond that, these platforms have explicitly promised free expression \u201cwithout barriers\u201d. To give us anything less than that is fraud<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

(2) They [claim] \u201cthese platforms have a 1st amendment right to censor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 as if censorship is a form of protected speech [\u2014] it isn\u2019t; censorship is a form of conduct. The state has always been able to regulate conduct. The idea that \u201ccensorship is speech\u201d was forcefully rejected by the 5th circuit court of appeals in their recent decision to uphold an anti-discrimination law in Texas. The court mocked the idea that \u201cburied somewhere in the enumerated right to free speech lies a corporation\u2019s unenumerated right to muzzle speech\u201d. No such right exists. And how could it? The claim that \u201ccensorship is speech\u201d is as nonsensical as saying \u201cwar is peace\u201d or \u201cfreedom is slavery\u201d.<\/p>\n

(3) They [claim] \u201cthese platforms are like newspapers; they can\u2019t be forced to print anything they don\u2019t want to\u201d.<\/p>\n

But they aren\u2019t like newspapers; they aren\u2019t curating every piece of content they host, and they aren\u2019t expressing themselves when they host it. They\u2019re merely conduits for the speech of others. That\u2019s how they\u2019ve repeatedly described themselves, including in court proceedings, and that\u2019s how Section 230 [of the Communications Decency Act] defines them.<\/p>\n

As a final point, I think it\u2019s important to acknowledge that a call for an end to censorship is not a call for an end to content moderation (some will try to make that claim). But \u00a7230 gives these platforms clearance to moderate \u201clewd, obscene, and unlawful\u201d speech, and anti-discrimination legislation would respect that. The only thing it would prevent is viewpoint discrimination. And such prevention would not be unconstitutional, because it would only regulate platforms\u2019 conduct; it would neither compel nor curb their speech.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Personally, I think TBB is dead wrong here, and their opinion is actually dangerous. I\u2019m unconvinced that UGC-centric websites should or even CAN be regulated like a utility. Dillon\u2019s redactive quoting of \u00a7230 in the closing remark belies bad faith. I\u2019m leaving this post tagged as \u201cdraft\u201d because I haven't properly expressed my thoughts here, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drafts","category-cthugha"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ishygddt.xyz\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ishygddt.xyz\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ishygddt.xyz\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ishygddt.xyz\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ishygddt.xyz\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2855"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.ishygddt.xyz\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2914,"href":"http:\/\/www.ishygddt.xyz\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855\/revisions\/2914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ishygddt.xyz\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ishygddt.xyz\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ishygddt.xyz\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}