Who is Censored More? Liberals vs Conservatives | Middle Ground

welcome back to middle ground and thank you to our sponsor dashlane for making this episode possible make sure you stick around after the episode for a special offer from dashlane but first here is middle ground free speech versus censorship take for example like white supremacy they don't go away because you censored them are they going to stop being a white supremacist i don't give a [ __ ] i do feel safer tech platforms play a big part in facilitating hate today twitter specifically has banned a number of different conservative accounts not just the president they can do whatever they want their private businesses i think that people should be able to say whatever they want online however i think that there should also be consequences the president of one of the most powerful countries in the world doesn't have access to social media i think platforms have a right to moderate content we really have to be able to discern who gets a voice and what they're able to say we need people in the conservative field to fight for our right to be conservative as somebody who has experienced censorship it ends up generating these chambers in which these ideas go completely unchallenged everybody kind of has to ask themselves should everybody really be able to say what they want to say hi i'm leah thomas i am a writer and the founder of intersectional environmentalists which is an online environmental media hub hi i'm lawrence i'm a public policy analyst for san bernardino county hi i'm bennett kelly i'm the founder of the internet law center and i'm an attorney who represents victims of online harassment i'm michael uh i'm 30 i'm conservative and i work in finance my name is jerome i'm a political science student i am 21 and i'm originally from massachusetts hello i'm joseph i'm an accountant and i'm working towards my cpa and i'm a part-time poker player the prompt is the right is more censored than the left i mean we think it's obvious right yeah i mean most i mean i'm assuming most of us are all conservative-ish you know in that spectrum but i think that a lot has happened during the january 6 riots that's why we see it more and that's why it's more big of a problem now you know parlor can't even be on the app store or you know i mean trump got kicked off twitter i mean he's the leader of the free world basically at least for the us and you know he doesn't even have access to a social media platform i don't i think there was twitter which was left-leaning long before there was something like parlor well that's what i'm saying yeah like i think that these echo chambers that are created as a result of censorship are a reaction they're reactionary they're not necessarily they wouldn't exist by themselves if if right leaning people weren't being sensed um i guess i disagree because usually when i think of conservatives i do think of the party of law and order so that was definitely something that trump uh spoke about often like there are consequences to your actions maybe more people could read the terms and conditions and find a platform that they feel more comfortable with like charler 4chan but what trump said wasn't really as bad as what i've seen other democrats say like us to not deflect what should be the appropriate consequences when someone violates the terms and conditions i think it should be like a clear punishment right it shouldn't be a punishment like especially for like being kicked off it should be for everybody but if if that is the solution that has to be the solution for everyone so no name sean king are two of the most prominent left-leaning activists that i know of and they have been repeatedly banned from twitter suspended from facebook instagram kicked them off and then when it happens to candace owens and ben sharparo we hear conservative voices are being but it's the exact same thing that was happening on the left that's now happening on the right so i think the problem is you the conservative i don't see you the conservatives that believe this rhetoric is being suppressed i don't think they know the other side is dealing with the same thing there's no real history of which i am aware of left-leaning creators being blacklisted the way that guys like alex jones james woods donald trump have been yeah alex jones was on on this journalistic scene for 30 years and they erased all 30 years of that how about the white house youtube channel they eliminated all of trump's videos all of them do you not see the difference though because sean king says abolish the police and you know say alex jones for example says jewish people are the uh owned most of the property in america and if you want to deal with property owners deal primarily with jewish people in 2015. so obviously there's a stark difference in rhetoric and consequence even you call the virus kung flu and then a rise in violence against asian americans who called it kung flu president did you say it directly though yes yes very directly he tweeted it yeah you tweeted it there are reasons for the differences and consequences but i think if we understand that it's happening widespread because i've seen people on the left say kill cops permanently banned permanently like done right so i think we have to take a step back remove ourselves from the box that we're in and kind of okay is it happening over here too there's ideas that exist on and offline that are abominable that i disavow unequivocally but that i subscribed to when i was younger you know when i was younger didn't understand what i was necessarily looking at didn't have enough worldview or perspective to know that these were not good ideas but because that they were censored by the forums that i was espousing them in i never had the opportunity to have them challenged i would never have the opportunity to have a conversation about why these were bad ideas there was no purveyance of the ideological free market and that's really the only way for these ideas to go away take for example like white supremacy people who have those beliefs those beliefs don't go away when you ban them from platforms those beliefs don't go away when you tell them to shut up those beliefs don't go away when you punch them in the face you know or when you revoke their rally permits but when do we draw the line because if somebody let's use kung flu for example what i said earlier let's say it's alex jones that says oh this is a chinese virus they brought it here and then we see a rise in hate crimes against asian americans what when do we draw the line because he would still have the platform yeah i mean i don't think we should deprive the people who are actually committing these crimes of the agency in committing them right you know like they are doing that and they frankly would be doing that regardless of whether or not there was somebody who was who was using inflammatory rhetoric online that's exactly my point when i say these ideas don't go away and then you feed that those ideas you build the anger so for example if you ban a white supremacist or a huge white supremacist group from twitter they're still probably going to be white supremacists chilling and hanging out outside of twitter right but it would be harder for that white supremacist group on that platform to inflict harm towards black folks right because then i no longer i do feel safer so if i'm being harassed by a white supremacist group or someone who's saying that black people don't deserve to live i do feel safer as a user are they going to stop being a white supremacist i don't give a [ __ ] i don't care they can do whatever they want to do that's their free speech however it does make me feel a lot safer i just think the left is now catching more up to us and realizing that the censorship is happening and then now it's kind of touching their side too more and maybe with sean king you see it you know i've definitely seen it pick up more in the past few months on both sides with the left i mean the example i gave was from 2014. i know that's been around for a while you know when you're looking at the civil rights movement and you're looking at the literal burning down of civil rights headquarters and things like that my parents and my grandparents my great grandparents in the civil rights movement were continuously policed and harassed for their beliefs violently so jailed for their beliefs so i find it almost it's hard for me to compare when civil rights folks are being imprisoned and killed for their beliefs however because a conservative can't use twitter i'm supposed to feel bad well i don't think there's a comparison what i wonder is whether or not there is a leftist ideologue someone who is similar to to alex jones or or someone like that that was blackballed from six social media platforms over the course of yeah right on the left it doesn't really happen at all look at look at what they admonish like abolish police you know give everybody health care like what in that world what in that realm would be like you're done you don't need to you know you're talking about killing people so we're saying burn it all down this summer during the riots buildings but that's not that's still hurt people's property yeah they build they save their most savings you know 2 billion damages as a country we need to say that violence is bad burning people's you know stuff is bad and killing i think we need to give perspective yeah it has to be content yeah because we can't say burning buildings is bad and not understand the reason as to why i don't agree with burning them but we kind of got to give context to both you know we can't we can't just say this is all terrible you know i don't want to be anecdotal about this but at the same time my parents are immigrants you know they work for everything that they have my mom she came from family six and she didn't have a lot when they came to this country and each each of their siblings including my mom they had to work for everything that they have and they made something of themselves so let's and then we also have rental properties so if one of them burned down because of a riot that's that's our life savings right there we put a lot of money into that do you know so i guess let's take it back to the civil rights movement because usually i think the the future sometimes is a better indicator of what's like morally right and wrong i lived about 10 minutes from ferguson and was there when those buildings were burning down and it was incredibly terrifying but i also remember the business owners who said i can replace my windows what i can't replace is a lost child so hearing those business owners hearing them i can talk about them hypothetically and how i hypothetically think they might feel but i also can talk about people who had their own buildings of course you know and people people who do say that they aren't they're on like you know the black lives matter side of not necessarily a lot but at the same time you know like i go back to business because you know i'm an accountant and i care about the numbers and all that stuff but i care about black lives matter but yeah we all care about black lives but also too like a lot of misinformation was spread about those rides too with the hands up don't shoot i they said that he was facing backwards and they found out that he wasn't and he didn't have his hands up we talked about last year yeah that's just let's just next they're spreading the misinformation and then it also and also if you'd like to have the perspective so i was there that day unfortunately and we can talk about censorship so after he was killed he was on the ground for four hours our radio stations were turned off and our news stations were turned off so we didn't have information as to what was going on which i agree allowed misinformation to spread however to say that so no i'm not agreeing with you but i'm saying maybe like know what the people in that community were faced with before speaking on something that you don't know it's terrible that's that's terrible the censorship of those radio stations is awful and i think it contributed to a lot of a lot of misinformation not just misinformation but pain pain and destruction that happened within those communities because people weren't being given the information they were entitled to yeah you know i think that in itself is an argument against censorship for sure tech companies should be allowed to ban whoever they want it's a hard one honestly because it is it whoever just based on what they deem is wrong like uh i don't know you know i worked in a country club once and they had the strict dress code for employees and even for members i mean you could as long as it's illegal right that's the one caveat yeah you can't say no jews no yeah whatever yeah as long as they they have a set terms and conditions then yeah they can ban whoever they want they shouldn't just ban whoever you know i think they should be able to say okay you're done even if it doesn't necessarily impede on the terms and conditions basically i think what we're having is a free market response saying they let them do what they want and let consumers go where they are but you have to have a function free market where people can go somewhere else but they can't right now though that's the problem who who wouldn't be able to go being removed from the app on web services basically it's an anti-trust law kind of thing because basically they're trying to create a monopoly between all the social media like twitter and facebook yeah i think that's what i got off of it i've actually talked to an owner of one platform who says they do more to combat hate speech on a per person basis than you know some of the larger entities but they still can't get picked up on um you know apple and the google play that's my problem the market isn't functioning properly then like okay should twitter have the leader of hezbollah be on twitter they're listed as a terror group by the uh by the eu and the u.s well they've been still on twitter they've been sued over that i mean and they've been sued over that as long as the tweets aren't promoting yeah terror violating its terms that's the yeah that's the yeah yeah is a political party part of that i know bin laden is dead but if he were alive and he made a twitter and he didn't tweet anything that violated the terms of condition to his point wouldn't they be able to still stay on the platform right i think that yeah i mean i think that should be fair because i agree they should just ban them yeah i'm just saying that like if they have a set guidelines and set rules they shouldn't like and they follow them then why would you kick them off in the first place i mean if it violates their terms and conditions i think they're they can ban whoever they want but i guess just a hypothetical if all of a sudden they were like we don't want to see breastfeeding so we're going to ban everyone just because we want to technically they can because they're a private you know business entity but i guess morally it kind of rubs me the wrong way i want to agree you know but i feel like if we if i do agree then i feel like i will be giving social media and tech companies far too much importance right you know people exist without social media i don't think if you ban somebody that's like a morally egregious act i think you'd be shocked the number of people especially like my age and younger who get their news exclusively from social media my worry about it is that the algorithms of these companies do not incentivize nuance yeah so a lot of the time you see like what trends is what is getting clicks and a lot of the time that's controversy but sometimes too though they artificially put things that are trending up there that really aren't well the problem is it's the it was advanced and twitter does that too we don't know what those algorithms are but there are suspicions that they are trying to fuel make conflict right and conflict creates clicks which creates comments which creates engagement and so in some ways social media is dividing us as much as it is bringing people together in this big platform oh they definitely profit off of the division too when we talk about the terms and agreements it's it's interesting because there's no there's nothing that says incitement of violence but if we do put incitement of violence then trump didn't really i believe he didn't incite them because he didn't say oh go to the capitol and you know break down the doors and windows but you have people on you know during the black lives matter movement saying be be restless oh you know break down stuff you know punch a nazi in the face maybe if you communicated with those people you would know that a lot of people were banned there were mass bannings of black lives matter supporters since 2014. i personally don't know anyone who identifies as antifa that's usually something that that's why i wanted to say i was like a talking point on the right but personally i i know they exist but i don't know much about them so i would love for you to explain so i mean they are getting banned i personally just might think so because like i think like maybe small people like because i focus on a big social justice account showing i feel like it's like larger people who actually said violence like maxine waters and i mean chris cuomo don lemon like chris cuomo's inciting violence he said like who's yeah who said who say protests have to be peaceful yeah i think a good um a good basis point to like look at that from is whether or not someone who goes on and incites violence who is a politician is being treated differently than like someone who goes on inside violence and is a protest organizer i think as as a concern yes the inequitable enforcement of terms and conditions is a concern to me on whatever side it's on and i think back to their various examples i mean i think one good one is the covington kids where a lot of people were putting things like oh we're going to kill these kids we're going to feed these kids into the wood chipper et cetera et cetera et cetera and they weren't really getting banned from it yeah and there was postulation in right leading circles that it was because those kids were wearing maga hats cancel culture is a conversation that has been happening in liberal spaces as well maybe we just we don't have like fox i don't know we have these other stations but maybe it's just not reported on a lot however i do hear so many conversations about cancel culture forgiveness and accountability happening in liberal circles as well spreading lies should be protected as free speech my thing here is that i think we have to be very attentive to who we make the arbiter of the truth when i think about lies and like people's lies you know i think about people's truths you know people's perspective people's opinions and you know that should be protected in that sense because if you feel something you believe in something or you have an opinion on something that is your truth that is well maybe to some people it's a lie maybe to most of the people it's a lie but that's your truth and you have the right to say your truth right when donald trump was started this campaign of you know the election was rigged he actually does believe that that is his truth it's it seemed like a lie to a lot of people on the left there are probably some people on the right and but he has the right to say that you know there's nothing in the constitution there's no there's no law saying well the question that begs is who who says whether it's a lie yeah who decides it's a lie yeah who's the argument i think you said if we allow lies to be spread as part of like it's free speech then we have what we have now currently is i think 500 000 people now died of coronavirus and a lot of them were died on account of just lies you know if you if you wear a mask you know uh you can't breathe in it you know what i'm saying you don't you don't have to social distance this is a liberal hoax so if we protect lies in the realm of free speech they have real life real-time consequences we protect people from certain things that are dangerous and if i said you know or you know take this placebo don't because it'll cure cancer and people did that and died that would be dangerous theoretically you would be liable correct i would be alive if you use your credentials to say drink this and it will cure your cancer and someone did that you would be liable but would cbs give me your time for a commercial for that no can we complain as conservatives that there's not enough fact checkers that are on the right there's snopes there's fact check they're on the left but there needs to be someone to take to scopes is on the left oh yeah how does the fact check because yeah the fact that it donates unless i check facts yeah well if they're actually a fact checking well are there any that you all support that we could like look into or do you think that's something that like republicans could try to that's what i mean that needs to be i personally think that i personally think that snopes and politico are by and large very accurate yeah i think yeah i mean i think oh i'm sorry go ahead no you continue please i think that they're by and large very accurate but i think as with literally any media source i mean you can't look at there is nothing that will be the unequivocal truth right there is nothing you know so you need to like look at i know that it's being written from a place of bi oh i mean sure like hydrochloxic horror queen is not going to like cure you of covid right you know that's not liberal or conservative that's just true that's stupid or not it depends it depends if it's like an opinion and then it also depends if people like politicians love throwing out different statistics and studies and things like that and as like a little sciency person i do believe in the scientific method for the most part and i think that things should be tested over and over and over again and i think providing those like if a politician is saying a statistic i think there should be some sort of fact-checking body however may i am totally on board with there being a fact-checking body that is say 50 republican 50 democrat i think that's that's totally fine it is political bias i'm sure in the snopes realm somebody on the corporate board is liberal you said the ceo fine but there is true and untrue and if we begin to link those two with like political affiliations then it's dangerous because we have no realm of truth there are lies that are harmful lawrence like you were describing you know there are a lot of lies that are harmful and have caused a lot of harm but giving the government the power to arbitrate what is and isn't true i think can also cause a lot of harm we're far more uh we should worry far more about the social sphere than the governmental sphere because we have the first amendment yes yeah first amendment should trump all that's at least where i stand yeah for the government right i think for individuals too well no i mean the first amendment is about government restriction on speech so a lot of people say i got banned on twitter and my first remember rights were violent no that that's a private it's a private company i get it some people should not have a platform i know this kind of goes against my freedom of speech outlook but like we were saying before like i don't want to see hezbollah having you know a twitter feed or i don't want to see you know isis having a twitter feed there's definitely a fine line you know i can't say everyone deserves a platform there's this thing called the paradox of tolerance yeah and i don't know if you guys are familiar with it but it's essentially saying that if we're tolerant of everybody if we give everybody a voice and we're like all right everything everybody says is okay as long as you feel that way if we're tolerant of everything then eventually our tolerance will be snuffed out by people that are intolerant i think if they're causing harm so like what we're all saying that's when and like serious serious harm i don't think that we should encourage that so whether that's like the illegal trade of an endangered species or that's a terrorist organization i think as a society we should kind of the reason why i didn't come forward is because you know i think it goes back to cancer culture in a sense like people who have been espoused from society because they did something so wrong is that cancer culture yeah and you know people do bad things and people have committed like terrible things to people or someone or you know group of people but i think forgiveness should be an element and people should have their chance to get back on their platform by i don't know doing something i i personally don't know what the social media companies would do but it's also like i guess d platforming versus banning versus just people not really wanting to mess with them anymore and usually the people who are really vocal about cancel culture sometimes are people who they still have their platform they still have their twitter they still have their instagram they're just mad that society has been like or kelly we don't like you or like you know what we don't like if you caused a bunch of harm to people the other thing i think about with d platforming is that you rob somebody of their opportunity for absolution so if alex jones were to decide and for somebody whose platform is their livelihood not whose platform or who who has a livelihood outside of their platform like jk rowling when you take that away from them if he were to suddenly turn around and he were to say okay the frogs aren't gay you know and like he was right about the frogs controlling the weather he would have no platform to come and say that which i consider it to be a problem am i the only one that's not um in favor of this whole like forgiveness you can come back thing i it depends yeah yeah i'm i'm not because i feel like i'm just on the degree yeah because i feel like i hate cancer culture i hate the notion yes that we can essentially exile somebody yes but on the same hand i still believe that consequences are real and if you have if you do something that causes lasting damage then you need lasting consequences you know if we if somebody is a manslaughter we put them in jail for life if somebody you know does something to to harm somebody for over a long period of time you should not be able to redeem yourself and come back to the same place that you were when you caused that arm you can have a niche audience like alex jones i'm sure he still has dedication but to say that everybody needs to forgive you oh no because i might not get through i have to be a consequence i don't it depends on your religion it depends on so many different things but yeah but i think people are able to come back to some extent but they're hating on the fact that they're not able to make as much money i can think of personal instances where i had opinions that were heard out of context that were rather moderate or something like that where people had very visceral reactions and immediately things started to come apart how dare and i wish for more of a chance to be heard and like i want i'm not going to state these things but they were not anywhere near the vein of what i was talking about earlier these were things that were just kind of unpopular and right easy to take out of context and i wished that i had more of a chance for people to hear me out as opposed to kind of react viscerally from the start i think there's also personal accountability so for example if i say something online and a bunch of people whether they're my followers especially if they're people who i know and trust and they have a really visceral reaction to it sometimes i think what's missing on social media is that moment for self-reflection of like did i say something that may have hurt other people can i get curious about it i might not agree with that person being hurt but can i at least empathize with it or do i want to get back on social media and say everyone is silencing me so then i can have a more niche audience of people who only agree with me because at this point i think that most people just want to feel seen heard and validated on the left and on the right and i think there are a lot of people on the right that do not feel seen heard and validated i'm not going to say that what you all are feeling is a figment of your imagination i think it's coming from somewhere and needs to be attended to you know you see all these bad things about happening to you know trump supporters and like they're getting their car key or stuff like that and then my parents are always like you know maybe you should just keep it to yourself and that's a shame because i thought we lived in a society where we could talk about you know different different ideas and we had that platform to have that free speech and you know to have a healthy debate and so it's kind of i feel especially my family and on social media is that they want to put me into submission to suppress my voice and my conservative opinions i don't i i can kind of resonate with what you said not necessarily from a family standpoint but you know from a like large-scale general you know generally speaking when somebody sees like somebody like like me just a black man you know like prominent in their beliefs about like you know uh the greatness of you know pre-colonial africa or you know just loving kente claws and stuff like that there are presumptions made and it obviously doesn't make people like me feel seen or heard or understood because you just seen me and made a bunch of assumptions you know assumed a bunch of things like i think we kind of have that problem not only with social media but just in general you know there's biases um it's it's tough you know it's tough to have any different opinion for any different voice all right you can bump it whatever you want to do thank you again to our sponsor dashlane for making this episode of middle ground possible dashlane generates and securely stores all your passwords and logging information on every website so you never have to click forget password ever again on any device dashlane lets you store basically everything passport information credit card info that autofills banking info and your wi-fi password all in one so you always have everything on hand on any device which is especially great for travel speaking of travel there's also a vpn so you won't be tracked and can access any content when you're browsing the internet in other countries for you good humans out there go to dashlane.com jubilee to get dashlane free on your first device and then use the code jubilee when 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Channel: Jubilee

Views: 468,238

Rating: 4.9083838 out of 5

Keywords: jubilee, jubilee media, jubilee project, middle ground, spectrum, odd man out, versus 1, embrace empathy, live deeper, love language, blind devotion, free speech, free speech vs censorship, liberals vs conservatives free speech

Id: XxrXkKUHvQI

Length: 29min 44sec (1784 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021

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[u/ProofOrItDidnthappen]

"Censor" is the new "Freedom"....

Nobody even knows what it means anymore....

If you break the rules you get booted.

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