Would President Kamala Harris shut down X, the social media website now run by Elon Musk? Supporters of former President Donald Trump—together with Musk himself—definitely appear to assume so.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the impartial semi-candidate for president who’s at the moment backing Trump, advised as a lot final week. He reposted an previous video clip on X of Harris during which she mentioned: “There needs to be a accountability that’s positioned on these social media websites to know their energy. They’re instantly chatting with tens of millions and tens of millions of individuals with none degree of oversight and regulation, and that has to cease.”
RFK Jr. transcribed a part of the clip and wrote that Harris additionally mentioned: “He [Musk] has misplaced his privileges.”
Kamala Harris: “He [Musk] has misplaced his privileges.”
Can somebody please clarify to her that freedom of speech is a RIGHT, not a “privilege”?Kamala Harris: “There needs to be a accountability positioned on these social media websites to know their energy.”
Translation: “In the event that they… https://t.co/BzuTYoJjuV— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) September 2, 2024
However Harris was not referring to Musk; she was referring to Trump. In reality, the clip—which Musk shared as properly—is from 2019, lengthy earlier than Musk acquired Twitter and renamed it X.
Accuracy is essential, and each RFK Jr. and Musk ought to modify their feedback in order that their sizable audiences perceive that Harris didn’t threaten to take down Musk, or all of X, or something of that kind. On the similar time, this incident offers a worthwhile reminder that 2019-era Harris was positively obsessed with getting Trump kicked off Twitter. Her monomaniacal deal with deplatforming Trump is consultant of a number of the worst tendencies in progressive speech policing and doesn’t bode properly for a future Harris administration.
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In 2019, Harris ran for the Democratic Occasion’s presidential nomination. She withdrew on the finish of the yr, in December, earlier than any votes had been solid within the primaries, and in the end endorsed the winner, Joe Biden.
However she was within the race lengthy sufficient to take part within the October 15 Democratic main presidential debate, alongside Biden and a slew of different candidates, together with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), and others. One significantly tense alternate passed off between Harris and Warren, when the latter pointedly refused to endorse the previous’s assertion that Twitter should ban Trump from the platform.
This clip is from 2019, when Kamala Harris kicked off a push to take away Trump from Twitter (and spark life into her failing marketing campaign.)
It failed. Harris tried to strain different candidates to hitch her however candidates like Elizabeth Warren dismissed her pic.twitter.com/TakvFOjBkn
— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) September 3, 2024
Harris laid into Warren, saying: “I used to be stunned to listen to that you just didn’t agree with me that on this topic of what ought to be the foundations round company accountability for these Massive Tech firms, once I referred to as on Twitter to droop Donald Trump’s account, that you just didn’t agree. And I’d urge you to hitch me, as a result of right here we now have Donald Trump, who has 65 million Twitter followers and is utilizing that platform because the president of the USA to brazenly intimidate witnesses, to threaten witnesses, to impede justice. And he and his account ought to be taken down. We noticed in El Paso that that shooter in his manifesto was knowledgeable by how Donald Trump makes use of that platform, and it is a matter of company accountability. Twitter ought to be held accountable and shut down that website. It’s a matter of security and company accountability.”
Warren responded by asserting that she had extra urgent issues than coping with Trump’s account particularly. (These issues included huge new antitrust initiatives that would cut back the affect of social media platforms, which might even be unhealthy.)
It was after the talk, throughout an interview with Jake Tapper, that Harris mentioned of Trump, “He has misplaced his privileges” on social media and must be banned.
Subsequently, Harris served as President Biden’s veep and was thus complicit within the administration’s huge strain marketing campaign to inspire social media firms to take down contrarian content material referring to Hunter Biden, elections, and COVID-19. Her remarks on the debate, all these years in the past, expose an obsession with policing disfavored speech on-line. And as Harris herself mentioned in a current interview with CNN: “My values haven’t modified.“
In current weeks, Brazilian Supreme Courtroom Justice Alexandre de Moraes has taken more and more aggressive steps to pressure Musk to purge alleged disinformation from the platform, ordering the elimination of over 140 accounts. When Musk refused, Moraes ordered the blocking of X for all Brazilians. Individuals who use a VPN to evade the block and entry X anyway can face fines of virtually $9,000 a day.
That is overtly authoritarian. As The Washington Submit wrote in an editorial lambasting such censorship: “Regardless of the risk to democracy that the accounts Mr. Moraes needed gone may need posed, the risk from one authorities official limiting the speech of 220 million folks is larger. Taken along with Mr. Moraes’s option to freeze the belongings of internet-provider Starlink, a separate firm of Mr. Musk’s, this transfer aligns Brazil not with the free world however with the likes of China and Russia.”
But not everybody agrees. Minnesota Legal professional Common Keith Ellison, a former Democratic member of Congress and former deputy chair of the Democratic Nationwide Committee, posted on X, “Obrigado Brasil!” which interprets to “Thanks, Brazil!” The remark was broadly interpreted as help for Moraes’s regime of censorship.
It’s worrisome to see a distinguished Democrat applauding a overseas authorities’s efforts to censor an American firm. Free speech is underneath vital risk from a rogue decide in Brazil, from the Chinese language Communist Occasion, and even from European Union tech regulators. Would a future Harris administration get up for the elemental ideas of the First Modification and defend the authorized proper to have interaction in disfavored speech, or would she search to convey X, Fb, and Google underneath higher authorities management?
Amber Duke is again! We talk about Harris’ flip-flopping, Biden’s low profile, a Meet the Press mistake, and extra.
Final week, I discussed that I used to be replaying one in every of my favourite video video games: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I’ve now moved on to its sequel, which could actually be my favourite recreation of all time: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Masks. This is a part of my 2020 evaluation commemorating its twentieth anniversary:
Majora’s Masks is a surprisingly subtle, lyrical meditation on the theme of dealing with one’s personal mortality. It forces gamers to think about what the sudden, sudden finish of civilization would seem like on the micro degree: for a mailman who’s run out of time to ship his final letter, for the pissed off director of a theater troupe, for a lonely dairy farmer, and so forth. Typically the hero would not save the world. Typically there aren’t any good outcomes. Typically it is just too late.…
An extended checklist of horrors awaits Hyperlink: a tree with a pained expression, later revealed to be a runaway son deformed and murdered by the Cranium Child; the ghost of a hero who died in an avalanche; a farm beset by alien (sure, alien) abductions. The sport’s inflexible schedule makes the horror extra actual. If Hyperlink visits the park north of city on the first night time—and solely the primary night time—he can save an previous lady from a mugging. If he fails, he should purchase her purloined items from the pawn store on night time two. There is a haunted home on a forlorn seashore, however Hyperlink has to cleanse it earlier than the third day, at which level the proprietor loses curiosity. It hardly issues, as a result of every thing resets when Hyperlink travels again by time on the finish of the three-day cycle. Go to the city’s laundry pool at simply the proper second, and a circus performer will confess {that a} match of jealousy precipitated him to steal a magic artifact from the circus’s chief: a canine. “Why was the canine the chief??” the perplexed performer wonders. Why, certainly?
This can be a fantastical recreation that bears little resemblance to something from the worlds of fantasy, and the sport’s visible type and musical cues reinforces the theme of dread. The townsfolk are pointy humanoids with exaggerated smiles and frowns. The swamp’s colour scheme is inexperienced and purple, giving it an unwell feeling. The background music progressively intensifies as time marches on, and the final 5 minutes of the third day produce a cacophony of bells and sorrowful sounds. Even the upbeat tunes have a notice of understated disappointment to them.
