NY Times Opinion: It’s time to take a second look at ‘free speech’ (Update)
John SextonPosted at 1:01 pm on October 4, 2019
The NY Times published an opinion piece today with the not-very-subtle title “Free Speech is Killing Us.†The subheading clarifies that this is going to be another rant about social media: “Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?†That last part is really what this is about. Author Andrew Marantz wants to explore solutions to the problem of free speech online. I’ll skip over most of the justifications and get right to those solutions, which seem to mostly revolve around new government efforts:
The Constitution prevents the government from using sticks, but it says nothing about carrots.
Congress could fund, for example, a national campaign to promote news literacy, or it could invest heavily in library programming. It could build a robust public media in the mold of the BBC. It could rethink Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the rule that essentially allows Facebook and YouTube to get away with (glorification of) murder. If Congress wanted to get really ambitious, it could fund a rival to compete with Facebook or Google, the way the Postal Service competes with FedEx and U.P.S.
https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2019/10/04/ny-times-opinion-time-take-second-look-free-speech/
