Name: The Issue with Trump Getting Banned from Twitter
Uploaded: 2021-01-15T18:52:58.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Issue with Trump Getting Banned from Twitter' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-15. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Issue with Trump Getting Banned from Twitter' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-15. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience it's a perfect time to have you on I mean this is I
mean
we're talking about free speech in the time when the president of the United
States has been banned off of Twitter and Facebook and it's right it's a wild
time what do you make of that well you know Facebook and Twitter are private
publishing right I mean what we don't exactly know what they are they're not
exactly like the times or like NBC or ABC but they're close they're they're
certainly in the private sector and and the private sector has always had has
always had the discretion it's their first amendment right to decide who to
publish and who not to publish you know it's different with Facebook and
Twitter
because they claim to be platforms like the telephone company that you know
anybody can use to have the conversations but they're they're not quite
that they they really are a lot like a publisher and you know the Times decided
to fire one of its columnists because it didn't like what he wrote they have a
First Amendment right to do so they're not the government so you know in that
to
that extent what Facebook and Twitter did is perfectly legal and and not really
different than what a publisher or a broadcasting company would do if it
decided to to change or or fire one of its one of its anchors or one of its
columnists on the other hand they are sort of like a platform like an
electronic
soapbox that they've erected and in a park and invited everybody and anybody to
come and when they start picking and choosing no you're not good you're not
good you're okay you know they still when they start being a gatekeeper you run
the
risk of them closing people out of of a national dialogue and depriving people
of an audience
basically and that that's a problem and it's a problem we haven't figured out
how
to work out yet because this medium is in its infancy you know it's people
forget that that the printing
press started in the 15th century in 1400 and something and it took hundreds of
years before
freedom of the press and worked itself out in ways that we're familiar with now
and we're you know we're right at the beginning of this internet speech
uh medium and uh it's hard it's hard it's hard to say uh i i think facebook and
twitter had the right to do
what they did in banning trump um but the question is if they start banning
anything that they don't like
then they're really closing off the public conversation to people and what what's
the criteria how do you do that
yeah it's also it seems to me that we're using these outdated
things to compare like uh comparing it to the printing press or comparing
facebook or twitter to publishers or even comparing them to something like a
utility like the the power
there there's something new there's something completely different and we i
mean i hope it's not
going to take hundreds of years to have some sort of a freedom of expression
online in these things but
they're monopolies it's not like anybody could have bought or made a printing
press and printed their
own books or printed their own newspapers not everyone can make their own
twitter you know it's too it's so
complex and there's so many users on it it it there's very few places where you
can like legitimately get
your word out in a way that you can with twitter or express yourself well but
you know and it's true that these
this medium is analogous to utilities in some ways analogous uh to publishers
in some ways but they
are new yeah they're different that's that's right but but consider this when i
was growing up uh i was
a teenager in the 50s um a big problem with free speech and the democratization
of free speech was that
nobody had access to anything i mean you had the times you had the washington
post you had the hearse
newspapers you had nbc and abc and cbs and that's where most speech occurred
and nobody had access to
that um so even with even with the monopolistic bans uh that twitter and
facebook uh are doing these
days or can do have the power to do um the fact is is that uh many many
millions more of people
ordinary people have access to huge audiences uh than did uh 50 years ago um uh
you know if you
couldn't get into the times and you couldn't get into the washington post and
if you couldn't get
onto television um you could speak you were free to speak but nobody heard you
yeah and so you know it's a
a lot better now even even with questions about abusing the power of of being a
gatekeeper that
twitter and facebook have yeah it's uh it's just such a strange time for this
because it's uh in
the middle of the like we're at the end of the president's run he's still in
office but yet he's
you know everybody wants him out as quickly as possible because you're
wondering what he's gonna
do and he can't really express himself uh publicly anymore it's it's just so
strange yeah well of course
you know he's still the president if he held the press conference uh everybody
would cover it that's
um and he you know if if uh i i used to say uh back in the day that uh you know
my father was a
construction worker with a fifth grade education and uh if he had something to
say he could say it to me
he could say it to our family at thanksgiving but uh he didn't have access to
an audience of the kind
that roosevelt had when he went on the radio and he couldn't get into the times
as easily as as the
governor of new york if the governor of new york held the press conference so
you know it isn't it
it isn't different in that in that respect i'm not too worried about a
president not having access
to a public audience a president has tremendous power uh to attract attention
and and that that
was true 100 years ago um what i'm worried about are ordinary people what i'm
worried about are are
people like you um uh people you know who have something to say uh but their
freedom is that they
get to say it in the closet you know where nobody hears them uh you know there's
an interesting
story uh a real case that happened in the 60s uh when james meredith who was
the first black person to
enter the university of mississippi uh was shot when uh on his first day there
and it was a it was a real
outrage who was in the early 60s and a uh a man named sydney street uh a black
guy living up in harlem in new
york uh was so angered that you know he he he wanted to say american ideals uh
american principles of
liberty and equal rights have just gone up and smoked today and if he had stood
on a street corner at 145th street
in harlem and stood up on a soapbox and said that the only people who would
have heard him were a few
dozen people who passed him on that street corner so what he did is he got out
in the street corner
and he burned an american flag uh it was his flag he owned it so he wasn't
destroying anybody else's
property he burned the american flag and by burning the american flag he
attracted television cameras
which his words by themselves would not have attracted so the television
cameras came and
he got to say i'm burning this flag to symbolize the fact that if a guy like james
meredith can get
shot just for going to school uh america's ideals have gone up in smoke and he
got onto the six o'clock
news and and millions of people heard it heard his words and he was prosecuted
for burning the flag which was a crime at the time and his case eventually went
up to the supreme court
and the supreme court overruled it and said it was symbolic speech uh but but
the reason that i'm
telling that story is that is that it it demonstrates how before there was an
internet people had to figure out
dramatic things to do uh to get their message uh to more than a handful of
people and that's why you
know benjamin spock burned draft cards that's that's that's why sydney street
burned the flag uh that's
why there were demonstrations uh instead of just instead of just words and and
uh you know it worked all
right uh for some people but for the most part uh most people could not get
their messages out to
large audiences until the internet came and so even with twitter and facebook
acting as gatekeepers in
ways that trouble us uh because we don't know what the limits are we don't know
what the standards are
and we don't know why we should be having these private people decide who gets
to hear what uh but
even with that um this the ability of ordinary people today to reach huge
audiences with whatever
it is they want to say is much much larger i mean by by orders of magnitude
larger than it was 30 or 40
or 50 years ago unquestionably um but it just concerns me when a corporation
has the ability to dictate
even if it's a problem president even if it's someone as crazy as trump just
when a corporation gets
together and they decide decide that this guy can't use their platform anymore
a platform that hundreds
of millions of people use it's just it just seems very strange well it is it is
it is a problem
because there are no standards right and that's what that's what i mean when i
say we're just the
beginning of thinking about how how to how to do that i mean here's here's what
what i see as the issue
um if you allow facebook and twitter to make these decisions in the same way
that you allow the times
and the washington post and and and television networks uh to decide what what
they publish
then you run the risk of of arbitrary exclusions uh from from people's speech
reaching large audiences
not just the president who has alternate alternative means uh but ordinary
people the only way to
remedy that is by law the only way to remedy that is to give the government the
power to regulate what
these corporations can do and all of our history shows that if you give the
government the power to
regulate speech you're going to be in a lot worse shape than if you allow the
private sector to do it
because who in the government are you going to give that power to um you're
going to give it to trump
you're going to give it to giuliani you're going to give it to joe mccarthy um
you're going to give
it you know to to roosevelt during the war who might have uh barred japanese
americans from speaking
to large audiences i mean who are you going to give that power to and our
entire history shows
that the only way to regulate private power is through government power and if
you regulate speech
through government power and you give the government the power to decide who
gets to speak and who
doesn't get to speak we will be in far worse shape uh than we are in in having
the private sector do that
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