SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the I-Disapprove-of-What-You-Say,-But-I-Will-Defend-to-the-Death-Your-Right-to-Say-It dept.
From an editorial in the Otago Daily Times out of New Zealand, Censorship a Trojan Horse:
It's an oft-cited maxim that the news media is the "fourth estate" upon which a healthy democracy stands.
It ensures the three traditional powers of state — the legislature, executive and judiciary — can be critiqued, challenged and curbed from quietly drifting into the arms of corruption and authoritarianism.
A free, fair, open and uncensored media is an antidote to state power and, for all its failings (and there are many), should be treasured as such. There are many countries around the world whose people would give anything for such a freedom.
Yet calls for the banning of certain opinion pieces, cartoons and commentary have risen in recent months, especially from those using social media, a world where such talk is becoming a trend. It is a trend we must confront.
Censorship is to suppress the harmful, the unacceptable, the obscene and the threatening from the media and other forms of public communication. Like a virus attacking democracy from the inside out, it was traditionally the tool of the dictator, though it is one used by many in power.
[...] It pays to query what those demanding censorship — be they celebrities, social-media activists or anybody else — see their ultimate goal as being.
To reduce hurt? To make the world a better place? Possibly, and those motivations are laudable. But the method employed to achieve them is not.
While censorship may be meant as a figurative horse upon which a better future rides, inside the belly of that horse lurks an army of conformity, quite capable of unwitting oppression.
History shows what happens when the fourth estate is no longer free to table all opinions.
It is a bleak picture. Without the disinfectant of exposure, power and ideals tend to corrupt even the most seemingly incorruptible.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Tuesday October 02 2018, @04:49PM
Not at all. CNN is free to spew their lies, we are free to point at them and laugh, and once their ratings are driven low enough to agitate to have them taken off of basic cable because we are tired of being forced to subsidize them. To drive them to streaming, to make them compete with Alex Jones out in the wilderness of zany ideas. And as a zany fringe publisher they lose their press credentials. They have a right to speak, they don't have a right to occupy a limited slot in the various press pools.
But that isn't the fight today and you probably know it and are just speaking with a forked tongue. The fight today is to force YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to -ADMIT- they are now publishers and not platforms. They currently seek to have the benefits of both and the disadvantages of neither. That is what is not going to be permitted to them, they are going to be forced to choose and be damned.
If they are platforms they are going to be overwhelmed by lawsuits from the millions they have illegally silenced. If publishers they die from lawsuits and more direct legal consequences over what they permit. So choose and be damned, BURN IN HELL, and be replaced by less evil platforms.