Florida Wants to Fine Social Media Platforms for Banning Politicians

It’s too little, too late.

Donald Trump’s biggest mistake was not stopping censorship when it started. If he would have dealt with censorship, there would have been no way to convince people to believe in this nonsensical coronavirus hoax, and he would still be president.

The First Amendment is the first of the amendments because it is the most important. Without it, none of the other amendments are relevant, because it is so easy to take them away when no one has freedom of speech.

BBC:

A controversial new bill that would stop tech companies from deplatforming politicians has been approved by both houses in Florida’s legislature.

The bill must now be signed off by Trump ally, Governor Ron DeSantis.

The legislation allows platforms to suspend accounts, but only for 14 days, and could fine the platforms as much as $250,000 per day for violating the law.

NetChoice, a group that promotes free expression on the internet, testified against the legislation last month.

Donald Trump was banned by Twitter and suspend by Facebook and YouTube after the deadly Capitol Hill riots in January.

Since leaving office, Donald Trump has spent much of his time in Florida and is believed to be close with Mr DeSantis, as well as other high-ranking Florida Republicans.

However, critics say the law could have unintended consequences.

Last month, Steve DelBianco, NetChoice’s chief executive, said while testifying against the bill: “Imagine if the government required a church to allow user-created comments or third-party advertisements promoting abortion on its social media page.”

“Just as that would violate the First Amendment [guaranteeing the right to free speech], so too does [this bill] since it would similarly force social media platforms to host content they otherwise would not allow.”

Although the bill was passed in the state’s House and Senate on Thursday, it’s likely tech companies will challenge it in court – saying the bill violates American’s First Amendment rights.

It is such abject lunacy that these people claim that the First Amendment gives private companies the right to destroy the First Amendment.

What none of these people will say is that the government subsidizes these companies in order to make them into monopolies. They have all of these various exemptions, including exemptions from anti-trust: that means they are subsidized by the government.

Furthermore, no one will say that these companies, and the mainstream media, are involved in a conspiracy to silence independent media, which is the direct competitor of the mainstream media. The mainstream media lobbies for mass censorship of competitors. This is a violation of all kinds of different laws against anti-competitive practices, and in the case of what they did to Donald Trump and his supporters, could actually meet the definition of sedition.

Whatever the case, it’s all just a bunch of gobbledygook.

The only way the Daily Stormer is online is with the blessing of non-Americans. Every single company in America, including all of the registrars, all of the CDNs, all of the servers, and so on, colluded together to silence my protected speech.

This idea that we have a “free market” where political pressure can be applied to everyone to cooperate with the same agenda to harm specific individuals is actually insane. As if it isn’t insane enough that communists are promoting hardcore anarcho-capitalism at all.

I have explained fully: all grocery stores and restaurants are “private companies.” According to the theory being put forward by the government, every grocery store and restaurant in the country can get together and decide to ban you from shopping there, at which point you would starve to death, and that would be totally legal.

With the vaccine passport, we’re actually going to see something very much like that, with these private companies colluding to deny service to individuals who refuse the vaccine. Just try to work that through in your brain: they are going to be legally allowed to starve you to death.

Related: Mainstream Conservatives are Supporting Tech Censorship in Order to Destroy Their Competition

This is what I warned about in 2017 when all of these ultra-libertarian arguments were being put forward by communists. I said: this will not stop with freedom of speech, they will take this into other areas, where they use the alleged rights of private companies to deny people their basic freedoms.