Let's play a game of who said it, shall we? See if you can guess who these excerpts come from when talking about Donald Trump getting kicked off Twitter, in response to being asked by The New York Times' Ezra Klein about the "censorious" left:
But if you’re asking me, do I feel particularly comfortable that the then-president of the United States could not express his views on Twitter? I don’t feel comfortable about that.
...Because yesterday it was Donald Trump who was banned, and tomorrow, it could be somebody else who has a very different point of view.
I don’t like giving that much power to a handful of high-tech people.
Doesn't that sound like something Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) or Mike Lee (R-UT) would say? Perhaps, but you'd be wrong. It's Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who is a Democratic socialist who caucuses with the Democrats.
I've interviewed @SenSanders many times over the years. But this conversation is, by far, the most optimistic I've heard him. He changed politics, and now he wants to see how far he can push.
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) March 23, 2021
You should listen to the whole thing, but a few excerpts:https://t.co/9zDHB2h7zu
Now, Sen. Sanders did criticize Trump, throwing out charges you'd expect about how strongly he disliked Trump, that he's "a bad-news guy," and what's next when it comes to communicating ideas on social media that others find to constitute "hate speech."
The senator still expressed the whole point of free speech, though, and of the dangers of curbing it. We've heard it time and time again that the answer to so-called bad speech, is more speech, which remains even truer today thanks to big tech. As Justice Louis Brandeis put it, "the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." I can't think of a clearer example of "enforced silence" than banning a then-sitting president from social media platforms.
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Raise your hands if you've been banned, shadow banned, kicked off, lost followers on social media. I'm sure it's quite a few. If they can do it to President Trump, however, of course they can do it to you. Why wouldn't they? What's stopping them?
Here is the full part of that interview. Notice how with his response to that question, Sen. Sanders brings up Trump all on his own:
Do you think there is truth to the critique that liberals have become too censorious and too willing to use their cultural and corporate and political power to censor or suppress ideas and products that offend them?
Look, you have a former president in Trump, who was a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, an authoritarian, somebody who doesn’t believe in the rule of law. This is a bad-news guy. But if you’re asking me, do I feel particularly comfortable that the then-president of the United States could not express his views on Twitter? I don’t feel comfortable about that.
Now, I don’t know what the answer is. Do you want hate speech and conspiracy theories traveling all over this country? No. Do you want the internet to be used for authoritarian purposes and an insurrection, if you like? No, you don’t. So how do you balance that? I don’t know, but it is an issue that we have got to be thinking about. Because yesterday it was Donald Trump who was banned, and tomorrow, it could be somebody else who has a very different point of view.
I don’t like giving that much power to a handful of high-tech people. But the devil is obviously in the details, and it’s something we’re going to have to think long and hard on.
Fortunately, we have Trump's own social media platform to look forward to. Stay tuned.
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