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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You can't gaslight people into misremembering what happened, which was coordinated efforts by government (leaning hard on social media companies) to shut down discussion.  People are not going to forget. [/quote]

The FACT is that House Republicans tried to have hearings on that but UTTERLY FAILED to prove there was some massive coordinated leaning hard on social media to shut down discussion.   You can check the actual CSPAN hearing video for yourself on how it was a failure.  If whatever media you follow didn't convey that to you then you are looking in the wrong place for where discussion was shut down.[/quote]

I don't need a congressional hearing to prove something I experienced personally.   [/quote]

That you posted some sketchy covid conspiracy crap and some mod deleted it (which nobody here denies) is hardly evidence of a grand government coverup.  Again, the House Republicans tried proving that and failed.  And if they failed in their fervent witch hunt, yours is also by extension a fail.  Accept the L and move on.  It was some random mod, not a government conspiracy.  You do not know more than, or better than the people who had far more resources and access to investigate than you do.[/quote]

That was a different poster.

People lived through a time when their lives were completely upended and day to day actions and personal health care decisions were dictated by government policies.

The decision to get a vaccine was foisted on people whose employers suddenly had to administer a vaccine mandate from the federal government.  Quiting your job suddenly and losing income and stability for your family is not an option for many people.   My employer never intruded on my healthcare decisions until Trump and Biden's administrations put in sweeping government covid policies.

People were understandably uncomfortable with a vaccine that was rushed through production and approved on an emergency use basis. Vaccines usually take decades to confirm safety and efficacy.  I participated in vaccine trials in college that I learned literally 10 years later hadn't been approved.  Then there was the ever changing promises that the vaccine would prevent transmission that were watered down to say, oh no, it'll prevent serious illness and or death. Most demographics were never going to die from covid anyway. It primarily affected the elderly.

Schools were closed, for quite a while, depending on the state. Young families were left to figure out how to work fulltime remotely while simultaneously homeschooling their kids while people screeched about how "school isn't childcare".  It is, actually.   Our entire economy relies on parents knowing their children are being supervised so the parents can work.

Small businesses were deemed nonessential and had to close while big businesses had the resources to lobby for different treatment.

You STILL have people who are trying to shut down discussion on the government pandemic response, years later.[/quote]

The "different posters" are all part of the same disease affecting American society - that we are being destroyed from within with willful and malicious disinformation.  Disinformation which caused huge numbers of Americans to get sick and die when it should have been preventable.

Meanwhile, nobody died because schools were closed.  Nobody died because some message board mod shut down what was, at the time, baseless theories about a lab leak.  And do note that school closures were largely a local decision.

Again, it's truly bizarre that people here on this thread, whether you or the different poster alike somehow arrive at the utterly bizarre calculus that somehow "Democrats are worse" or "Democrats are destroying society" when it wasn't the Democrats who were getting Americans killed by the thousands spreading anti-vax garbage.

If you still don't get it, then you're truly hopeless.  People dying a horrible death from covid is FAR worse than you being butthurt because some mod locked or took down your post.  That's just objective reality.[/quote]

The law isn't about relativism. The federal government can't be censoring speech through a third-party, like Facebook, no matter how beneficial it would be to the American public. [/quote]

And House Republicans tried to prove that the federal government was censoring, and failed.  And by the way, the First Amendment doesn't actually give unconditional blanket protections and carte blanche to post whatever you like.  For example if you post classified information you absolutely will be prosecuted and convicted.  Likewise, in most US jurisdictions, it is unlawful to threaten to harm or kill people or destroy their property (terroristic threats), or to falsely hold yourself out to be a physician, police officer, or member of other regulated professions.

So you fail to make your case on the law piece, and you [i]completely[/i] failed on the morality and relativism piece.  Two fails for the price of one.  Congratulations.  [/quote]

It's unclear to me how blind you can be:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/judge-rules-white-house-pressured-social-networks-to-suppress-free-speech/

Further, you seem to be claiming that covid theories are classified information. That's an interesting straw man but not what we are discussing.[/quote]

First of all, nobody here claimed covid theories were classified information.  That was given out as an example of how the First Amendment is in fact not absolute and that the government does indeed have the legal right and authority to suppress information which can trump the First Amendment.  So, that's a strawman entirely of your own making.  Improve your reading comprehension.

That said, what came out of the GOP hearings was testimony and evidence that Facebook and other social media companies were in fact NOT under undue pressure and that there were MANY instances where either they declined to do anything about instances where the government asked them to look into it.  They weren't following government orders, and there were no consequences for not doing so.  Zero, none.  Additionally, there was a lot of evidence that came out of the hearings showing that in many cases social media companies were suppressing posts entirely of their own accord, for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with the government.  I personally can cite the fact that I was banned from Twitter, for no good reason other than the fact that I criticized Elon Musk's blue checkmark program.  I was suppressed and the government had absolutely nothing to do with it.  [/quote]

I didn't compare the covid theories to classified information. You did. You didn't make any argument that it was necessary for the government to censor the information. Only that the government can censor free speech, so any time it chooses to do so is legitimate.

The GOP hearings are irrelevant, just like most Congressional hearings. A federal judge told the executive office to stop pressuring social media companies. The companies were rightly afraid of government retaliation. They had no "independent" action at that point.

Just because you were censored by a private company doesn't mean that government censorship doesn't exist. [/quote]

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