Full Video: Office of the Virtual President | Big Tech Censorship
Full Script:
It’s been said that the twin pillars of any relationship are trust and communication. This is true whether you’re talking about family, friends, business, romance, government, or society in general. If one falls, the other must bear the full weight, creating more strain and increasing the likelihood of total failure. If a person has broken trust, then open and honest communication is the key to rebuilding confidence. On the other hand, if one person cannot or will not disclose something, then it comes down to how much you trust that said person has a very good reason for keeping silent.
Once both of these pillars fall, however, the rest of the relationship can no longer stand.
If there is a singular purpose to social media platforms, it’s undoubtedly the facilitation of communication between people so as to build relationships and exchange ideas. Such open and honest communication, in turn, breeds social trust, making for a safer and more stable culture. The content of those ideas might be good or bad, but ultimately, that is the function of social media, in as much as a telephone or radio is a means of communication; and the best way to counter bad ideas is with better ideas.
The best way to counter bad speech is with good speech. Attempting to silence people only drives them underground, whereas sunlight is the best disinfectant.
At the same time, we trust that the companies who provide this service will do so reliably and fairly for all people, and we trust their intentions are honest because we cannot peer beneath the hood to see how their APIs and their algorithms work. The general public has neither access nor the technical knowledge to simply recreate this for themselves, and so they must rely on a handful of specialists working for private corporations to provide them this service. In our modern world, where everyone is interconnected, it is technically possible to live off the grid, away from cell phones, laptops, and social media, as humans have done for eons past; but it is a hard and bitter life in many respects – a lonely road by comparison. It is not practical or viable to ask this of someone. Such modern methods of communication are all but essential for even the most-basic of tasks in a world that is more connected than it has ever been.
Content creators will become the new small business owners in time, with their livelihoods being made on their ability to wield social media effectively.
Right now, many of you listening to this have had your means of communication stifled and suppressed by Big Tech censorship, or you otherwise know someone who has. Whether it’s arbitrary suspension, shadow banning, deranking, demonetization, false flagging, lack of access to appeals and manual review, or simply the malicious intent of a biased unseen moderator … the sting of this betrayal is quite visceral. It’s a wound that cuts deep, disrupting the natural flow of society, and has begun to spread to all facets of our lives.
It’s an auto-immune disorder that undermines our ability to self-correct and heal, attacking the very body politic it’s meant to serve.
Worst of all, the perpetrators of this injustice hide behind high walls in their silicon towers, unable or unwilling to hear and address your righteous claims. Whether that’s due to them being bought off by advertisers and foreign interests, caving to a vocal minority of squeaking political activists, or acting upon their own self-righteous moralizing … either way, the result is the same.
They are silencing you, destroying lives, and tearing at the fabric of society.
Whether intentional or not, their actions have resulted in the formation of echo chambers and the raising of our social temperature to the point where we can no longer have open and honest communications with those who disagree. Instead, the world is divided into teams engaged in tribal warfare, with half the population harboring mistrust of the other.
The heads of these tech giants hold a virtual monopoly over the communications industry and are shielded by the federal government, such that you cannot strike back at them or hold them to account in a court of law, the way you would with any other company that has so-thoroughly violated their relationship with their customers.
Clearly, such despicable behavior is utterly intolerable, and cannot stand.
Today, I am pleased to announce that decisive action has finally been taken on this issue.
Just this morning, I have signed into law a simple, straightforward, bipartisan bill that does exactly one thing: It requires all social media companies operating in the United States to declare themselves as either a platform or a publisher, restoring the protections of United States Code Article 47, Section 230, and holding these same entities responsible for any and all editorializing, which shall include the selective curating of content that is not otherwise in violation of U.S. law, or which does not fall under basic codes of conduct online, such as terms against spam and harassment.
Effectively, this new law means that companies like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and others will have to make a decision. Either they allow all forms of legal speech on their platforms, regardless of political or religious content, regardless of factual accuracy, or how they might personally feel about it – and in so-doing gain the benefit of plausible deniability to say, “We’re just a carrier, we’re not responsible for what others create on our platform,” in as much as the phone company is. Or else, they will continue to censor and shadowban and algorithmically manipulate user content – as would be their right as a privately-owned publisher – in which case, they must now accept full and unconditional responsibility for that decision and they shall be subject to lawsuits the same as any other publisher.
And for those of you disaffected by these companies, you shall have additional tools with which to sue for tort damages, breach of contract, defamation, and fraud.
In this way, we shall begin to heal the division in this country and our world. In this way, we shall get back to doing the work of solving problems and making everyone feel better about the state in which we find ourselves.
People have the right to be wrong on the internet, and more often than not they are. If you care about stopping hate and falsehood, that duty lies squarely with you, the individual men and women of this country, and of the world at large.
What does it say about your faith in your own beliefs if you are unwilling to have them challenged, or if you are unwilling to confront and correct those whom you think are spreading bad ideas?
Trust and communication are the twin pillars of any relationship, and this country has been through far worse than what we see now. We have overcome hatred and oppression, stagnation and falsehood through active and open and honest communication with one another; and today, that power is restored to you once more as we strike back at the oligarchs who run Big Tech.
In this way, we shall make America greater than ever, and build a future of freedom for all.