When the Republicans take Congress next year, they should get working on an Internet Bill of Rights, and one of its provisions should include jail time for corporate employees who abuse banning and censorship tools to commit acts of political repression.
Fines aren't enough. Mega-wealthy politicized Internet platforms would find ways to pay the fines for their employees. The cost would be acceptable compared to the political advantage gained. Make the censors think long and hard about how they, personally, are in legal jeopardy.
It's very unfortunate that we need an Internet Bill of Rights, but it's painfully clear that we do. It's the least intrusive response to politicized censorship. A company that inserts itself into our elections and manipulates the outcomes is no longer a fully "private" entity.
It's a joke to claim we have a principled national commitment to political liberty and free speech if we're just outsourcing authoritarianism to private entities. We sure as hell aren't going to win the great ideological battle for the 21st Century against tyranny that way.
The tyrants are laughing at us right now, saying we don't seem to have any objection to their censorship regimes and social credit systems as long as a few politically connected billionaires are in charge, rather than government officials - Truth Inc. vs. the Ministry of Truth.
The tyrants argue that having a government ministry in charge of censorship and social credit, instead of a few self-appointed billionaires, would be better - more accountability, more rational, more honest.
Of all the many things we should be privatizing, oppression and censorship were the LAST. Social media giants became giants by pledging their commitment to free speech. We should hold them to those promises. What they're doing now is not just repression, but fraud.
It's funny how all those little "errors" and "mistakes" of censorship and banning skew in one political direction, isn't it? I guarantee that garbage will stop when criminal investigations and jail time are on the table. Nothing else will stop it. /end
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