Free Speech Battle Heads to Supreme Court | CLIP | Live with Josh

[Music] [Applause] welcome to Crossroads folks yesterday was super Tuesday meaning we now know who the election who we now know who's going to be the main candidates for the Republicans and for the Democrats as many of you may suspected Joe Biden is going to be the candidate for Democrats unless they make him step down we'll have to see and Donald J Trump is the candidate for the Republican Party he won by a well Landslide is maybe an understatement he won by a massive Landslide against Nikki Haley I'll read you the actual numbers Trump gained 722 against Nikki Haley's 46 of the delegates total 995 for Trump 89 for Nikki Haley meaning that Nikki Haley fell very very very far behind Trump not enough to put a dent in him now there was some concerns that even if she lost that Nikki Haley might actually run as an independent uh she had said previously just before all this that she may not of course recognize the Republican party's agreement which she of course agreed to when she did the debates that she would of course recognize Trump as the candidate were he to win that raised some questions on whether Nikki Haley was going to run as an independent uh by doing that of course she would probably split the Republican vote and maybe make Trump lose but Nikki Haley seems to have be doing the opposite now she is stepping down and Epic Times says this Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley ended her 2024 bid on March 6 stating that the time had come for her to accept defeat Miss Haley announced the news in a short speech before supporters in Charleston South Carolina and it says Miss Haley's announcement comes a day after super Tuesday the day consisting of the most primaries in which presidential election cycle in which former president Donald Trump swept all but one of the races meaning Trump won all but one area and I believe that was Washington Trump 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 going to 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 Trump maybe they'd find a reason to arrest him or charge him with 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 could 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 in other words 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 uh 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 or 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 uh 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 Le States forcing social networks to censor how dare those 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 way that would violate the First Amendment of the Constitution rather than say that the corporate media are saying again that it's sensorship 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 oped 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 oped from a political person you don't agree with uh you do have a right to choose what to post and what not to post on your websites 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 and is 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 respons 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 post 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 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 where we see conservatives getting deplatformed 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 they 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 Al that they dismantled a lot of it these sites have demonstrated most of them the ability to moderate and censor 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 and 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 Comm 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 into to testify before Congress you really strong arming them into censoring People based on what the government does not want you to be seeing 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