[snitty]

I, too, remember when Obama has the FCC commissioner threaten to revoke broadcast licenses for the coverage of his tan suit.

This type of both-sides-ism is dumb, especially here when one side is using the power of the federal government to get dissenting voices taken off the air.

[arp242]

I see this "high-ranking elected officials" vs. "A few anonymous nobodies on Reddit and Twitter (now Bluesky I guess)" type of false equivalence all the time.

[asdff]

About a dozen times in this very thread alone, so far in my scrolling.

[nobody9999]

>I, too, remember when Obama has the FCC commissioner threaten to revoke broadcast licenses for the coverage of his tan suit.

I can't find any specific references to that. Is there a statement from an FCC commissioner or from Obama when he was president?

I'd really like to see such statements.

[dzhiurgis]

Source for this?

[themaninthedark]

In the 2019 through at least 2022, Government agencies were "recommending" and "cautioning" social media companies on topics such as COVID and stories about laptops.

[snitty]

Two things here.

1. Trump was president in 2019 and 2020.

2. There is an important difference between a bureaucrat calling up someone at Facebook at arguing a position about policy and the chair of the FCC threatening to remove broadcast licenses. Notable, Supreme Court has even weighed in on the former and found it well within the rights of the government to do.

[themaninthedark]

I included the earlier dates to capture the various government agencies comments on Hunter Biden's laptop, which I doubt that you can claim Trump was directing.

As for point 2, I am not aware of any of the government directed censorship going reaching the Supreme Court.

>On July 20, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield appeared on MSNBC. Host Mika Brzezinski asked Bedingfield about Biden's efforts to counter vaccine misinformation; apparently dissatisfied with Bedingfield's response that Biden would continue to "call it out," Brzezinski raised the specter of amending Section 230—the federal statute that shields tech platforms from liability—in order to punish social media companies explicitly.

>In April 2021, White House advisers met with Twitter content moderators. The moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform."

Is there a difference between the White House stating they are looking at Section 230 and asking why this one guy has not been banned?

https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-...

[otterley]

False speech does not have the same Constitutional protections as true speech. That's why, for example, you can be prosecuted for defamation, fraud, or false advertising.

However, the Constitution also sometimes protects intentionally false speech such as parody and comedy.

You can see that it's a heavily nuanced issue.