Free Speech Battle Heads to Supreme Court

Advertisement but one of the races meaning Trump won all but one area and I believe that was Washington. Trump said based on the Washington DC one he says I didn't even bother with Washington it wasn't my focus I think Trump assumes he's dead in the water in Washington DC and he's not even gonna bother trying and he also cited the legal attacks against him saying he wasn't too interested in going there to speak because given the way Washington behaved with Trump maybe they'd find a reason to arrest him or charge him or something as they've been doing by the way. Now that said I want to talk about something else folks the Supreme Court right now is readying to hear a case that can determine whether censorship on social media platforms is legal or whether it violates the constitutional protections on free speech. Now this particular case focuses on laws in Texas and Florida that restrict social networks from carrying out political censorship and critics of these programs in turn are saying that it's government censorship to restrict the platforms from censoring based on government recommendations so they're saying it's censorship of censorship and thereby censorship regardless of the technicalities in this right regardless of what this all means and you know the surface argument a Supreme Court decision on this could focus on the broader topic because that's often how the Supreme Court works focused on the legalities of online censorship overall meaning we could actually see a sweeping ruling that could impact not only the idea of censorship of censorship but even of the first part government censorship oftentimes by proxy whereby government officials advise social networks and so on on what content to suppress or remove or whatever else they're doing which is one of the main methods of censorship we've been watching under Joe Biden. Let me show you folks Bloomberg has this it says the long-running fight over perceived anti-conservative bias on social media platforms reached the US Supreme Court this week when the justice has heard oral arguments in two related cases challenging state laws in Texas and Florida limiting how internet companies police their platforms now briefly the big narrative you're going to be hearing across different news outlets is if you're reading a conservative news outlet they're going to be talking about government censorship of conservatives that there is a political bias in the way these outlets are censoring people and if you're a conservative chances are you cannot say what you actually think if you're a Democrat or liberal you probably can even sometimes very extreme things like advocating violence or burning down cities but of course that's the nature of the argument here and the other side of the argument is also on censorship by proxy now again Bloomberg says the states say they're combating abusive corporate behavior the tech industry says the laws violate the First Amendment it's censorship to tell us we can't censor and dozens of outside groups have weighed in with briefs tackling the debate from various angles essentially they say this is a disagreement about whether tech platforms are threatening their users freedom of speech or are having their own freedom of speech threatened by the government now of course that's Bloomberg so you know reading that you'd almost think this is about Republican led states forcing social networks to censor how dare those totalitarians right in reality though this is about those states Florida and Texas trying to make it so that social media sites are not able to censor people and I'll get into the caveats of this it's a little complicated you know at least not in a way that would violate the First Amendment of the Constitution rather than say that the corporate media are saying again that it's censorship to restrict censorship now look there is some truth to this like for example if you run a website and somebody wanted to publish an op-ed and you didn't agree with it or somebody wanted to publish something in your chats on your website and you don't want it there you typically have the right as the owner of that website to delete it you don't have to publish an op-ed from a political person you don't agree with you do have a right to choose what to post and what not to post on your website nobody can make you do it technically the issue though ties into a few things when it comes to this in particular social media platforms and of course search engines one of these is section 230 of the Communications Decency Act now that section makes it so that social networks are relatively free from legal responsibility over what their users post you know if someone posts threats on the platform if somebody posts illegal content like you know pornographic images of children or something like that or if somebody posts for example you know other types of illegal content or you know things that are abusive in some way that violate the law typically the platforms are not held responsible for it because of section 230 the reason for this is that they're not the ones publishing it that's the argument right this is how you separate the technicalities of Facebook Twitter and Google and so on from your average normal website the argument is this again first off they're not the ones publishing things they give people a platform to publish things meaning it's not them publishing it it's the users and this is all hinged on the idea that the websites would not have the ability to moderate and censor that much content imagine if you have a website that has tens of millions of people and you know you're not going to be hiring millions of moderators or hundreds of thousands of moderators to be able to watch all of that the concern would be that no site no website would be able to compete in such an environment where they are then held legally liable for anything that any user publishes on the site now because of this protection Google Facebook Twitter cannot be held legally accountable if somebody posts something on the sites like pirated content or other types of illegal things and you know it's a way to prevent suppression of people's free speech as well on websites like social networks it makes it as well that these things work like town squares in other words if an individual wants to express a political opinion there the website holder is not held liable for that and also the individuals able to have their own free speech so the issue when it comes to this whether there is political bias and how these websites are censoring people will receive conservatives getting the platform censored demonetized and so on like myself by the way or whether it's people able to say almost whatever they want depending on which side of the political aisle they're on the issue is on whether social networks and such should still have the type of legal protection if they're showing vast powers of censorship because look they have protection from section 230 based on the idea that they're incapable of moderating and censoring that number of people that they have so many users that would be it would be unfeasible you know in terms of manpower and even money to carry out that type of moderation and of course the concern that by doing so moderating and censoring that many people monitoring every post that it would require a type of surveillance and a type of just massive budget to carry that out the issue is though they risk changing the nature of their product if they do that and through that changing the agreement on the legal protection and that's the issue we're seeing now Google Facebook other meta platforms Twitter to an extent of the lead is mantled a lot of it these sites have demonstrated most of them the ability to moderate and censored users to that extent raising the question of whether again they should lose this protection section 230 and look there's more to it also this is the real issue at play some of the censorship we seeing is not just moderation this is the big argument a lot of the censorship we're seeing is not just people at Google or Facebook being politically biased in many instances it's the federal government directly or indirectly communicating these platforms on content to censor in other words you have individuals from the Biden administration communicating directly with Facebook Twitter formerly Google other websites even Amazon and flagging individual posts even down to the local government level you have channels open where government officials can flag content where international figures including at the World Health Organization can flag content and by doing that they advise these websites and even pressure them even calling them in to testify before Congress you know really strong arming them into censoring people based on what the government does not want you to be saying meaning it raises the question of whether that constitutes as well government censorship and not just a violation of section 230 this case in other words going to the Supreme Court could look at all of this now here's more on this particular case it says here from CBS News the Supreme Court heard arguments Monday in a pair of social media cases that could transform online speech it says the two cases concern disputes over Republican-backed laws in Florida and Texas that aim to restrict social media companies from moderating content which tech groups representing platforms like Facebook and X see as a violation of the First Amendment rights now it notes the laws both passed in 2021 came in response to what their backers saw is discrimination by social media platforms the controversy followed social media companies decisions to ban former President Donald Trump from their platforms after his handling of the January 6th 2021 attack on the US Capitol which it wasn't by the way now look further and it says that while Trump filed a brief in support of a state laws arguing that a platform's decision to discriminate against a user is not protected under the Constitution the Biden administration filed a brief in support of the tech groups it argued among other things that the high court has repeatedly held that the presentation of speech generated by others is protected under the First Amendment as is often seen among the opinion pages of many newspapers further in it states that one of the cases involves a 2021 Florida law that regulates large social media platforms in an effort to combat claims of censorship it does so by prohibiting platforms from engaging in certain types of content moderation ie censorship while requiring platforms to notify a user if the company removes or alters opposed it also compels platforms to make disclosures about their operations and policies get that as well they sometimes not only delete your content or hide your content sometimes they even alter what you write that was by the way one of the big issues seen a few years back with a reddit a lot of people forgot about this history the one of the main guys at reddit was seen allegedly posting using a username stone tear and some people dug up posts from the same username on a cannibalism subreddit where someone using the name stone tear was writing about eating human flesh with barbecue sauce I'm not making this up right after this made headlines but people I think mostly forgot about by now the individual the head of reddit began altering content on the platform and under the narrative that he was fighting against hate speech in reality they locked the cannibalism subreddit that people had discovered and then of course he went and started altering people's posts that kind of established a precedent of the ability of these platforms to go into users actual posts and change what they were writing again forgotten history there folks but back to this article further and it states the other case centers on a Texas law that likewise regulates platforms imposing restrictions on content moderation requiring a platform to notify user when content is removed and compelling platforms to disclose how they moderate and target content now look of course we'll see where things go with all of this the Supreme Court could potentially make a very broad ruling on this that could significantly impact the ability of governments to censor by proxy it's an interesting argument because the the case hinges around Republican states right it's Florida and Texas saying that these platforms cannot censor users if the Supreme Court rules that Florida and Texas can legally censor users based on political censorship it could create a kind of dual internet system whereby censorship of that nature is allowed and you can see for example different states having different laws on that type of censorship the other way is the Supreme Court could say it is not allowed at all no government can censor the internet and if they make that ruling it means that this censorship by proxy and other things is off the table the other issue we're gonna have to see is whether this will also whether this works in the section 230 argument again of the Communications Decency Act and the discernment of a platform on whether they make suggestions from governments on censorship meaning censorship by proxy whether that is also allowed and there's even the problem of global censorship laws now by the way rules forced by other countries you know Elon Musk has been exposing some of this including in a recent censorship demand from India India demanded that Elon Musk on X his platform begin censoring certain types of political content Elon Musk's response to that has been to implement the laws from India just to India not to every other country on earth same thing with France same thing with the European Union different countries on earth have different censorship laws and some platforms fold to that globally they allow countries the other worst abusers of censorship to censor everybody on earth others like Musk keep it limited to that one country and you know we're seeing issues like this from the Communist Party for example trying to force companies to censor globally they do this to Hollywood by the way one of the big things we're seeing as well in other words there's many forms of government censorship direct censorship censorship of censorship censorship by proxy and international censorship and it is possible the Supreme Court ruling could look at all of this or maybe a more narrow perspective but this case could significantly alter the laws on how the internet is regulated and how much of a role governments can have on that type of content it could be a major ruling folks but I'll keep you updated now that being said back on the issue of censorship this could be a very big issue for the 2024 elections as well you know frankly again the elections are decided by the voters at least we'd like to believe right hopefully meaning that when you cast your vote you're doing it based on the information you've been exposed to you agree with one candidate more so than you agree with the other one or you don't agree with one of them at all it also means for example that the votes you cast is based on the information you've been exposed to the nature of government censorship especially the communist states is to limit the information you're exposed to to narrow your view to narrow the scope of what you're able to perceive and by doing so make it so that you're incapable of dissent now that doesn't work in free countries where the system is determined by an informed public making informed decisions it is up to us as voters to look at information judge for ourselves what is best for the country and choose who leads the country for a certain amount of time based on the information we've you know taken in and of course there are movements right now to narrow the scope of the information you are capable of taking in we call that of course political censorship and leading up to the 2024 elections we're seeing this go into overdrive yet again we already see some censorship tools getting rolled out aimed at censoring information around the elections in the United States take for example which took place in Washington just the news said this an artificial company working on behalf of the Washington Secretary of State's office our own government to track election and voter misinformation flagged factually accurate stories on non-citizens voting that were published by the Center Square while the reports from the AI company claims the stories could undermine confidence in the state's election process frankly I think it undermines my faith in the elections less you know or more if illegal aliens and non-citizens are voting in our elections but they don't want you knowing that they say that knowing this is happening undermines your confidence in the elections it says these Center Square's review of the stories were based on internal government documents and emails obtained through public record requests in other words it is verifiable fact non-citizens have been voting in the elections and they're trying to censor posts that tell you about it last year SOS it says signed a contract with UK based AI company logically to search online content on various social media platforms including X formerly known as Twitter for harmful narratives regarding Washington's elections or voting the company also tasked with generated reports to be sent to SOS for review highlighting emerging narratives related to Washington's elections or voting according to SOS they say quote the criteria for these searches was specified by OS OS staff and is nonpartisan in other words they were censoring legitimate concerns people may have over non-citizens voting they were censoring actual information on how the American election system is being undermined and it's being done by a British company a UK company not an American company and again and also in cooperation with the government local government in Washington personally I'd say that is censorship personally I'd say that brings in the tyrants from Europe into American elections and should be considered foreign election interference when our government works with a foreign company to censor content in America that would of course inform voters of actual problems Americans should know about problems in the system so we know how to cast our votes to fix those problems but doesn't end there right a similar censorship system is causing similar problems elsewhere take for example what's happening in Oregon I'll be talking about this part though only on epic TV folks because I'm being censored as well on YouTube so make sure to jump over to epic TV where I will be talking about how election censorship systems are already beginning for the 2024 presidential race but before we jump I recently investigated a secret biolab that was discovered in California my team and I went to that lab found out what was happening there and what we discovered was absolutely shocking you can watch this special report only on epic TV EPOCHTV.com link is in the description below so make sure to jump with there with us to epic TV for the rest of the episode major gaps in regulations are allowing clandestine labs like the one in freedom to operate Chinese laboratories just can't help themselves the more you look into it the crazier it gets I would ask oh what are you doing with the mice oh well we don't actually do that it's someone else that does the experiment if the Chinese Communist Party wants to start a lab in the United States there's no American law to stop them from doing it