If Congress Doesn’t Rein In Big Tech, Censors Will Eliminate The Right From Public Discourse – The Federalist

Something both convoluted and disturbing happened on Twitter this week that illustrates why its not enough for lawmakers in Washington to haul Big Tech executives before congressional committees every now and then and give them a good talking to.

Congress actually has to do something about this. Regulating social media giants like Twitter and Facebook as common carriers, prohibiting them from censoring under the absurd pretext that speech they dont like is harmful or abusive, would be a good place to start. If that doesnt happen, Twitter will eventually ban every conservative voice and every media outlet that dares to challenge left-wing pieties about race, gender, and a host of other issues.

Heres what happened. On Wednesday evening, around the time Twitterbegan censoring Federalist articlesby appending a warning they may be unsafe and their contents could be violent or misleading, I got a notice from Twitter support letting me know that someone had complained about a tweet of mine noting that Rachel Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, is a man.

As a result, my tweet would be banned, but only in Germany, where, according toTwitters explanationof what it calls, country withheld content, an authorized entity issued a valid legal demand to block my tweet.

I had written the tweet in response to news this week that Twitter locked the account of Charlie Kirk for saying Levine is a man. Banning Kirk made no sense, I wrote, because Levine is obviously a man a man who dresses like a woman, but a man nonetheless.

To be clear, Levine is a 64-year-old man who spent the first 54 years of his life presenting or living publicly as a man. He was married and fathered two children. In 2011, he decided to transition and began dressing and presenting as a woman, changing his name to Rachel Levine (previously, he went by Richard, his given name). He divorced his wife of 25 years in 2013.

Levine is and will always be a man. His story is a sad one, and far from mocking or berating him, conservatives should pray for him and hope that he gets the help he obviously needs.

But none of this is really about Levine. Its about Twitter. Twitter locked Kirks account after itlocked the account of The Babylon Beeearlier this week for postingan articleheadlined, The Babylon Bees Man of the Year is Rachel Levine, riffing onan actual USA Today piecenaming Levine as one of its 2022 women of the year, despite the fact that Levine is a man.

After Twitter locked out the Bee, which is a satirical publication, its Editor in Chief Kyle Mann tweeted, Maybe theyll let us back into our @TheBabylonBee Twitter account if we throw a few thousand Uighurs in a concentration camp, which prompted Twitter to lock Manns account for hatful conduct. Later, the Bees founder Adam Ford was locked out of Twitter for retweeting Mann.

While all this was going on, articles at The Federalist suddenly started getting blocked by Twitter. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the handful of articles that were blocked, but it started withan article by Libby Emmonspublished Wednesday morning entitled, Everybody Knows Rachel Levine Is Truly A Man, Including Rachel Levine.

When my colleague Tristan Justiceasked Twitter about it, a spokesperson told him, the URLs referenced were mistakenly marked under our unsafe links policy this action has been reversed. Nothing to see here, it was all just a big mistake!

But we all know it wasnt. It was no more a mistake than my tweet getting flagged in Germany, of all places, or Kirk and Mann and Ford and the Bee all getting locked out of their accounts. This kind of behavior from social media companies has become all too common for anyone to believe that getting locked out of your account or getting an article taken down is ever a mistake, and certainly not when the tweet or article in question is asserting the plain truth that a man does not become a woman simply by growing his hair out and putting on a skirt. When youre account is locked overthat, its on purpose, and the point is to shut you up.

And its not just Twitter. This week, YouTuberemoved a bunch of videosfrom the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, including a speech by J.D. Vance and a panel discussion with Federalist CEO Sean Davis, Rachel Bovard, and Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla. a panel discussion that happened to be aboutthe harms of Big Tech and how federal law protects them from liability.

Its obvious that these firms will eventually silence everyone who dissents from their woke ideology. Theyre not even trying to hide it anymore. If you say that Rachel Levine is a man, or that Lia Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer who just won an NCAA Division I national championship, is a man, they will come after you. It doesnt matter that Levine and Thomas are in fact men. Truth is no defense against censorship by Big Tech.

So until Congress under what would have to be a Republican majority, given Democrats enthusiasm for online censorship acts to put an end to this, it will continue. And the list of things you cant say will grow. Before long, you wont be able to say, for example, that abortion is the taking of a human life, that gay marriage is not the same as marriage between a man and a woman, or that children should not be taught that America is systemically racist.

In such an environment, the only way to ensure the censors dont come after you is to follow the extraordinary example of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was asked by Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., on Tuesday during the confirmation hearing to define the word woman. Jackson replied, infamously, Im not a biologist.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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If Congress Doesn't Rein In Big Tech, Censors Will Eliminate The Right From Public Discourse - The Federalist