Meltdown! CNBC Doesn’t Want Debate On Freedom Of Speech Or Election Concerns
3 min read
Vivek Ramaswamy, co-founder and executive chairman of Strive, a job training and career development services nonprofit agency with service providers across the U.S, who joined CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box’ on Thursday to discuss the path to turning Twitter into a free speech platform.
“Free speech isn’t about protecting the speech you agree with. It’s about protecting the speech you *disagree* with,” Vivek posted after the interview.
The hosts on CNBC were completely and visibly uncomfortable as Vivek did an excellent job of arguing and advancing the points of free speech, saying that we – in the US – need to restore debate in the country and stop calling opinions ‘hate speech.
WATCH:
NUCLEAR MIC-DROP @VivekGRamaswamy 🔥🎤
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 3, 2022
Notice that CNBC pushed the -all too common- theme of election deniers, which apparently we are not allowed to talk about:
Vivek: I think the way you treat the misinformation point is different from the way you treat the category of hate speech. I think you can’t have hate speech in the category because all opinions are allowed.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: There are a lot of people who deny the election results of this last election, some of whom, by the way, looked like they may win next week. Do you think that there should be people correcting the record?
Vivek: I think there should be people correcting the record through free speech and open debate, not through silencing them and not through censorship…
Sorkin: How concerned are you with either democracy or the very idea that there are large parts of the population who believe things that are just factually untrue today?
Vivek: I am deeply concerned about threats to democracy, but I think those threats to democracy, Andrew, are plural. And one of those threats to democracy is the centralized determination of truth. By the way, and here’s the invention we haven’t talked about, where the government itself is now coordinating with Twitter, with Facebook, etc. to direct critics of the government to be silenced. This is something that I think is also a threat to democracy, where you have a government using private companies to censor.
Vivek wrote after the interview:
“The answer to bad speech is not less speech. It is more speech. That’s the American way. It should be the way forward for Twitter,” he wrote.
“I vehemently disagree with those who want to burn our flag, but I will defend to the end their right to do it. That’s what America itself.”
“People made the same pro-censorship arguments when the printing press was invented; when the telephone was invented; with the birth of the modern internet; and now with the birth of social media companies. Free speech isn’t a liberal arts luxury. It’s a precondition for democracy.”
“Simple principle for Twitter: let the user decide what they do & don’t get to see, rather than deciding the answer to that top-down. Decentralization is better than centralization.”
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