The Left’s War On Free Speech Hits Twitter
Over the weekend there was some big drama on Twitter, with conservative activist Chris Loesch (husband to CNN contributor/radio host/blogger Dana Loesch) having his Twitter account deleted. What happened? It turns out that Loesch was the victim of a campaign by liberals on Twitter to mark his account as spam.
After an avalanche of complaints, Twitter suspended Loesch’s account. Then they re-instated it. Then they suspended it again.
Currently Loesch is back on Twitter, though he lost all of his previous followers. Which is a big deal. Twitter has become a major platform for political communication, and while they’re a private company and can use whatever criteria they’d like when it comes to who can and cannot post on their service, letting one political faction silence another with bogus claims of spam is just plain lame.
Hopefully Twitter can find a balance between acting on legitimate spam complaints (real Twitter spam is very, very annoying) and ignoring politically-driven complaints. But to me, this is just another example of the left’s war on free speech.
Whether it’s the left trying to banish the term “illegal immigrant” or outlawing controversial speech under the guise of political correctness or fighting a crusade against bullying, it’s pretty clear that our liberal friends have a problem with free speech and expression. And these are just recent examples. For decades now conservative speakers at college campuses have been subjected to not just protests, which would be acceptable on their own, but interruption, verbal abuse and straight-up assault. Simply because the overbearingly liberal campus majorities detest conservative politics.
Liberals have long supported the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine, which would hamstring conservative talkers by imposing mandatory ideological balance. The left has also supported policies such as Net Neutrality, which under the guise of protecting access to the internet would give the government control over internet content.
The left has a free speech problem. They’ve had one for years. The kerfuffle with Chris Loesch on Twitter is just the latest manifestation of it.
Tags: chris loesch, dana loesch, free speech, twitter
