Whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, Independent or whatever, we all must be very concerned with the actions of Twitter recently. The ability of a social media platform to censor political speech is a direct threat to our democracy. Whether you like the president or not, whether you agree with the president of not, is irrelevant. When platforms like Twitter come after the President and take down his political speech, they are really coming after you. Are we only allowed to tweet our thoughts and beliefs that are pre-approved by Jack Dorsey and his cadre of thought police?
Are we as a country that weak minded that we cannot discern for ourselves what to believe and what not to believe? Do we need Jack Dorsey to lead us by the hand? Is Jack Dorsey that much smarter than us that he can treat us like little children? I submit to you that he is not smarter than us because he believes that censoring free speech is a good thing, when we all know it is not only bad, it is evil. Censoring free speech is a precursor to totalitarianism. I can’t believe that in the year 2020, we are even having a debate on censorship. I guess we are not as enlightened as we claim, and maybe we do not study history the way we should. Nothing good has ever come from censorship.
We are fully capable of taking in many pieces of information, many varying opinions, and using our own brains to decide what is true and what is false, what we believe and what we reject. We do not need Jack Dorsey to do that for us. And who is so arrogant as to think that they have the inside scoop on what is the objective truth? Does anyone really believe they are that smart?
Most everything that “we know” is essentially what we believe to be the truth. For the last 50 years, we have been told by many people who happen to be left leaning, that there is no objective truth, that everything is subjective, everyone has their own truth, their own valid perspective, and now many people on the left want to fact check and delete tweets by the President?
We have been listening to experts espouse their scientific facts and knowledge for the last four months about the pandemic, and what I have found is that these so-called experts have been wrong as often as they’ve been right, and the science and facts they espouse can’t really be trusted. Dr. Fauci changes his tune every third day. And that’s fine. He’s doing the best he can.
And for Twitter to pretend that they have cornered the market on objective truths is laughable. The overwhelming majority of what is tweeted is opinion. Trump espoused his opinion that mail-in ballots were susceptible to fraud. Twitter censored that opinion. Whether you agree with his opinion or not, it is a plausible position. Has there ever been voter fraud in this country? Yes. It has been proven that many dead people have voted in many elections. In 2012, a woman was arrested because she voted 8 times in the Presidential election. Is voter fraud potentially a concern? Yes. It always is. Voter fraud is a direct threat to our democracy. Voter fraud disenfranchises tens of millions of voters if it is allowed to occur. If voter fraud and illegal voting wasn’t a concern, there wouldn’t be poll watchers. So, setting up a way to vote which removes layers of verification, is opening the door to fraud. This is not an unreasonable position to take.
After spending the last three years telling us that the Russians meddled in our elections and they are a threat to our democracy, suddenly we are to believe that voter fraud is not a concern. Couldn’t the Russians set up agents in strategic districts across our country and mail-in fraudulent ballots to get the candidate they want elected? Couldn’t the Chinese do that? How about one of our political parties? Are we no longer concerned about foreign influence in our elections? That’s all that was talked about for three years.
So, to “fact check” President Trump’s opinion on mail-in ballots is laughable because there are no facts surrounding it. It is all opinion. Maybe Jack Dorsey didn’t like this opinion because certain people he is allied with plan to use this way of voting to get the desired results.
The answer to speech you do not like is more speech, not less. If you disagree with Trump’s stance on mail-in bailouts, you answer him with facts and evidence that disprove his claim. You engage in a dialogue. You show every argument from every side. That is an honest intellectual academic approach to an issue. But if you have no evidence to disprove claims you do not like, you censor them.
There is so much misinformation being spread on social media, and for Trump’s tweet about mail-in ballots to be the one taken down obviously proves that there is an agenda being pushed other than pursuing the truth.