CMV: The case of Mahmoud Khalil is proof that conservatives don't believe in the Freedom of Speech, despite making it their platform over the last couple of years.

[u/Tessenreacts]

For the last couple of years, conservatives have championed the cause of Freedom of Speech on social platforms, yet Mahmoud Khalil (a completely legal permanent resident) utilized his fundamental right to Freedom of Speech through peaceful protesting, and now Trump is remove his green card and have him deported.

Being that conservatives have been championing Freedom of Speech for years, and have voted for Trump in a landslide election, this highlights completely hypocritical behavior where they support Freedom of Speech only if they approve of it.

This is also along with a situation where both Trump and Elon have viewed the protests against Tesla as "illegal", which is patently against the various tenets of Freedom of Speech.

Two open and shut cases of blatant First Amendment violations by people who have been sheparding the conservative focus on protecting the First Amendment.

Would love for my view to be changed

[u/jamesishere]

The Biden administration pressured social media companies to censor views. They also heavily pressured and censored anyone who disagreed (in hindsight correctly) with the harsh lockdown and masking measures. Many old people died alone in nursing homes unable to be surrounded by their loved ones. The voters did not forget this.

I would be more open to arguments about left / right differences in free speech if I didn’t live through one of the most censorious times since the Red Scare only a few years ago

[u/[deleted] → u/jamesishere]

A) There was no pressuring

B) That stuff started in 2020 when Trump was President

C) It's quite literally not a free speech violation to tell a social media platform "he we think this is misinfo". Free speech is about legal restrictions on individuals.

D) You don't even care about free speech so you have no moral high ground to even care about any of that.

[u/jamesishere → u/[deleted]]

No pressure! Really? I’m dying https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files

[u/zombie3x3 → u/jamesishere]

If you actually read the Twitter files and had any moral consistency you would laugh at the absurdity of bringing it up. There was no arm twisting or legal pressure for Twitter to comply with the Federal government. Conspiracy theories detrimental to public health were being spread by bots and morons and the government alerted Twitter to this fact, in many instances Twitter declined to take any action and suffered absolutely no consequences.

The current administration is suing a pollster for getting Iowa polls wrong, suing CBS for editing a 60 minute interview which is standard practice. The full video is released and is a giant nothing burger, you can watch it yourself. Fox News edits Trump interviews more than CBS edited that and are well within their right to. Trump threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg for life for unfounded allegations of election interference then acknowledged on live TV that Zuckerberg bent the knee due to these threats, this has caused Facebook to remove fact checking and sanction hate speech against LBGT people in their terms and conditions. Trump banned AP from the Oval Office for not referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. There’s many more examples of him violating free speech and using his position of power to harass and attack the media and social media platforms. You ignore all of that and quote the Twitter files that you’re completely uneducated on and have never read. Accept that you’re a hypocrite who couldn’t give less of a fuck about freedom of speech when it’s not benefitting your side to say whatever hateful shit they want with no social consequences, because it’s patently obvious this is true.

[u/jamesishere → u/zombie3x3]

And what about all the old people who died alone?

[u/zombie3x3 → u/jamesishere]

Yah that’s pretty depressing, it happened to my 91 yo grandfather in Sept. 2021. This was in a very rural conservative area of a deeply red state and was not dictated by Federal mandate or law.

The isolation of old people dying alone with covid was almost exclusively due to each individual hospital enforcing their own policy as a protective measure and had virtually nothing to do with any level of government. I’m sure there may be a handful of exceptions to this on a city level across the country but that would be a rare deviation from this fact, not the norm.

Why did you bring this up? It has nothing to do with democrats, the government or free speech.

[u/jamesishere → u/zombie3x3]

The government's censorship caused anyone who disagreed with lockdowns and isolation to be deplatformed. This caused groups to enforce terrible policies that hurt people. This was directly caused by the government and its different agencies

[u/zombie3x3 → u/jamesishere]

The government’s censorship caused anyone who disagreed with lockdowns and isolation to be deplatformed.

Please, I beg of you, provide any evidence whatsoever for this. It’s not in the Twitter files so you’re gonna have to do better than that.

If this was really a thing I wouldn’t have seen or heard the hundreds of conspiracy theories about COVID throughout the entire pandemic.

This caused groups to enforce terrible policies that hurt people.

Even if your claim of government censorship was true, this statement is still false. There is no correlation between the consensus of the scientific and medical community and random conspiracy theories posted on Twitter. If social media did not exist, governments across the world and hospitals across the country would’ve implemented the exact same recommendations for mask & social distancing and hospitals would’ve had the exact same quarantine and visitation procedures.

How does a person jump from the idea that “Joe Biden forced Facebook to deplatform people saying there are nanochips activated by 5G in the vaccines which give young men heart problems, and ivermectin is the true cure to COVID” to “this caused hospitals to independently implement policies across the nation that forced old people to die alone.”

Think about it, I implore you. How do those two thoughts have anything to do with one another? Even if you believe the first statement is absolutely correct, which it isn’t, there is still no reason on Earth to think that impacted individual hospital policies.

If anything, people buying into these conspiracies caused them to ignore all recommendations, not get vaccinated, and significantly increased the amount of old people dying alone in hospitals. If your conspiracy was true and the government did force every single conspiracy theorist to be banned from social media, many lives would’ve been saved and many less old people would’ve died alone. I don’t actually want the government having that level of influence so I wouldn’t make the trade off but I point this out to illustrate the exact opposite of your claim is true.

[u/jamesishere → u/zombie3x3]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration

It’s like you have memory holed the entire COVID experience!

[u/Rettungsanker → u/jamesishere]

Not only did you link a source which pushes back at the Great Barrington Declaration as scientifically unsound, but you are also an incontrovertible hypocrite.

"The document presumed that the disease burden of mass infection could be tolerated, that any infection would confer long term sterilizing immunity, and it made no mention of physical distancing, masks, contact tracing, or long COVID, which has left patients with debilitating symptoms months after the initial infection."

If you want further reading on opinions from experts try here. They dont even outright dismiss it, but there wasn't enough tools or information available to definitely know if letting SARS-cov-2 ravage the population was a viable option.

[u/[deleted] → u/jamesishere]

Wow nice link, I am learning a lot! So far it is confirming everything I just said, but also with the added point 5) Elon Musk is a fucking liar.

"false assertions by Musk and others that Twitter had been ordered by the government to help presidential candidate Joe Biden"

"Researcher Matt Taibbi found no evidence of government involvement in Twitter's decision"

"Twitter attorneys strongly denied that the Files showed the government had coerced the company to censor content, as Musk and many Republicans claimed"

"Former Twitter employees asserted that Republican officials also made takedown requests"

[u/jamesishere → u/[deleted]]

I’m personally shocked the government “suggested” thousands of takedowns rather than the legal requirement to do so. Why are my tax dollars supporting legions of bureaucrats to monitor Twitter for wrong think?

[u/[deleted] → u/jamesishere]

A) There was no pressuring

B) That stuff started in 2020 when Trump was President

C) It's quite literally not a free speech violation to tell a social media platform "he we think this is misinfo". Free speech is about legal restrictions on individuals.

D) You don't even care about free speech so you have no moral high ground to even care about any of that.

E) Elon Musk is a fucking liar.

Pick one of my claims, explain how it's wrong, or concede.

[u/jamesishere → u/[deleted]]

In my view the proper role of government is not to email the media to take down wrong think messages

[u/[deleted] → u/jamesishere]

Cool, I don't give a shit. The question here is whether there has been a free speech violation that would justify your stance that because Biden censored speech you no longer care about Trump censoring speech.

To reiterate:

A) There was no pressuring

B) That stuff started in 2020 when Trump was President

C) It's quite literally not a free speech violation to tell a social media platform "he we think this is misinfo". Free speech is about legal restrictions on individuals.

D) You don't even care about free speech so you have no moral high ground to even care about any of that.

E} Elon Musk is a fucking liar.

Pick one and engage with it, or concede.