Can Social Media be Regulated as Common Carriers?
The Dershow
Alan Dershowitz | Kast Media
4.4 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2021
⏱️ 24 minutes
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Summary
Justice Clarence Thomas has stimulated an interesting debate about ways to regulate social media. But is the cure more dangerous to free speech than the current censorship?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Justice Thomas has written a very interesting opinion about whether or not the law can stop |
| 0:09.7 | social media like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook from censoring material. Is the solution |
| 0:16.4 | worse than the problem? You'll hear why it is a difficult choice on the der show. |
| 0:22.3 | Justice Clarence Thomas says just written a concurring opinion which raises really fascinating |
| 0:30.5 | issues about how we can control the excessive censorship of the internet without in any way |
| 0:39.1 | seriously intruding on the first amendment. It was a concurring opinion in a case which, |
| 0:44.3 | ironically, the then President Donald Trump was trying to engage in censorship on the internet |
| 0:51.3 | that is he was precluding certain people who obviously were very critical of him |
| 0:57.5 | of responding to his Twitter feed and forwarding his Twitter feed. So, ironically, |
| 1:03.8 | then President Trump who was railing against the censorship of the media was himself trying to |
| 1:09.2 | control his own Twitter feed and of course then Twitter banned him completely. And the case went |
| 1:16.3 | to the courts and it came up to the United States Supreme Court about a week ago and the court |
| 1:22.1 | dismissed it as moot correctly because he's no longer the President and the issue was whether the |
| 1:26.4 | President as President an official of the government can control access to his Twitter account |
| 1:34.4 | which he used both in a private and a public capacity. It would have been an interesting case |
| 1:39.0 | but it was moot because he was no longer the President but at the time the case came up with |
| 1:42.4 | the Supreme Court so unanimously the Supreme Court dismissed the case as moot but that didn't stop |
| 1:47.2 | just as Thomas from writing an interesting opinion really more like a law review article. It's |
| 1:52.6 | a little dictum and concurring. It's not the law but he basically said look we have a problem |
| 1:58.2 | and we're going to have to deal with this problem sooner or later and inevitably there's going to |
| 2:02.8 | come a case that the United States Supreme Court will have to take about whether or not the major |
| 2:09.2 | major media, internet outlets and Facebook, Twitter, Google are going to be able to control what we |
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