Political censorship at the hands of technology companies is “the greatest threat to free speech and our democracy today,” wrote Donald Trump Jr., eldest son of President Donald Trump and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, in a Monday-published column at the Hill.
Trump Jr. highlighted the left’s hostility to the value of free speech and expression, which he described as occasionally “edgy, brutal, irreverent, and sometimes downright offensive”:
For all the platitudes offered by liberal journalists about the free press standing as a cornerstone of democracy, they do not actually have a very good grasp of the concept. The free press that the founders envisioned looked a lot more like the Reddit users who roasted O’Rourke than New York Times writers who misrepresent basic tenets of free speech and demand censorship to protect their friends from “online harassment.”
Trump Jr. recalled surreptitious censorship of his and his father’s Instagram profile in September. Instagram is owned by Facebook, headed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“If social media can do that to the president, then no one is safe,” wrote Trump Jr., highlighting left-wing and partisan Democrat biases shaping many technology companies’ censorious conduct.
Prohibitions against “hate speech” are ubiquitous across social media platforms’ terms of service, with Silicon Valley-based companies refusing to use the First Amendment as a standard for determining the parameters of permitted speech and expression on their systems.
The “Silicon Valley monopoly” poses a “threat” to free discourse in “the modern public square,” added Trump Jr.
“Technology companies allowed liberal activists to dominate their corporate culture and abuse their power to restrict free speech,” concluded Trump Jr., adding, “If Big Tech keeps kowtowing to this, it might very well soon regret it.”
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.