Welp. Now the advocates of Government Control are directly saying "we should regulate free speech like guns." Via Wired which is being especially totalitarian.
I remember when pointing out if someone were hostile to the Second Amendment they were likely to be hostile to the First was something only paranoid gun-nuts would say.
We need social network control—sensible rules about where, when, and what kinds of platforms should be free to operate, much the way nearly all governments in the world impose comprehensive regulations about where, when, and what kinds of guns should be allowed in communities. To fail to rein in social networks because of appeals to “freedom” would be like allowing vague words written 250 years ago to get in the way of controlling guns.
This is not written by someone parodying gun control talking points. This is written by someone who is praising a country banning social media after a terrorist attack. A country that the writer openly admits "has a relatively unfree press".
Note the writer is explicitly using the "The founders would never have intended X!"
An attack where guns were not even used.
But by focusing on those individuals’ shortcomings, wasn’t I buying into the argument that there was a good way for these social networks to operate, even during a time of crisis or during divisive elections? If only they had the right leaders! In essence, I was replicating the tired defense of unrestrained gun ownership—social networks don’t kill people, people kill people. In point of fact, guns magnify the violence of their users, as do social networks.
And this scary bit? Note how "decisive elections" are slipped in there.when talking about a media and clamp down after a terrorist attack. A terrorist attack done by an organized cell, not some lone person or group of social media trolls.
But like how gun control advocates will use an attack where the killer murdered to get his guns to blame the manufacture's advertising or attacks where the killer passed a background check due to governmental incompetence to demand expanding the existing background checks.
The facts simply don't matter.
I recommend reading the whole article. Its is a frightful example of how the folks who soothingly say they only want "common sense gun control" and then turn around and demand speech control.
Another scary part is that the author out and out lists several defenses /against/ the totalitarian controls he dreams of framed explicitly using firearms analogies:
* People should be able to defend themselves, good guy with a gun / users should be able to make their own speech to counter speech they disagree with
* Social media bans have can result in more violence / cities with more gun control have higher gun violence
* So what if other people use free speech for bad purposes, I did not. IE "I don't care if every other person in the world murdered someone with a gun, I did not.
* Social media can allow people to communicate in a crisis, firearms can allow people to defend themselves in a crisis.
Annnnnd... the writer's response to all that? Ignoring it. Except for the first which was dismissed as " every-person-for-themself anarchy" (which is really scary because if someone were to make an analogy that only the state should have guns to free speech...)
and a conclusion that says that people *not* demanding for free speech controls are like people saying "Thoughts and Prayers" instead of offering real solutions...
Like using a terrorist bombing attack to try to ban free speech... or ban guns.
