Pao was reflecting the mindset of others who have headed or still head the various social media giants. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal
said in 2018 that Twitter should “focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content … how we direct people’s attention.” Sure. If those “free-speechers” were given free rein, they might end up directing people’s attention away from the opinions and views approved by the elites. People might even start thinking for themselves. Can’t have that.
Meanwhile, Facebook, according to
Fortune magazine, has been “clamping down on hate, increasing penalties for users who repeatedly share misinformation, and linking readers of any post related to COVID-19 to information from government sources.” What if those government sources share “misinformation”? That possibility is not considered; nor is the change of what constitutes approved opinion over time.
This creeping authoritarianism and the increasingly open opposition to the freedom of speech of Pao, Agrawal, and others strikes at the very foundations of free society. The freedom of speech is an indispensable prerequisite for any society truly to be free. If speech that is not calling for or justifying violence or criminal activity can be proscribed for any reason, then a tyrant can take advantage of speech restrictions in order to silence opponents and dissidents.
In America today, however, fewer and fewer people understand or believe this. In October 2019, the Campaign For Free Speech (CFS), a pro-First Amendment advocacy group, released poll results that showed, the CFS
stated, “just how vulnerable free speech protections” were in America today.