Hey, Michael Steel Podcast listeners, Michael Steel here with another quick take from the

Michael Steel Podcast. Check out what's going on right now.

Welcome back everybody to the Michael Steel Podcast, Michael Steel here having a wonderful

conversations with Francis Fukuyama who is out with this new book, Liberalism and his

discontents. One of my favorite chapters where you talked about individual autonomy.

But for the moment, focusing on how these platforms actually have worked to undermine

the foundations, if you will, of classical liberalism.

Well, they've done it in several ways. So, you know, a basic liberal principle is freedom

of speech that we don't regulate speech. Anyone can say what they want and there's a marketplace

of ideas in which hopefully as a result of deliberation and discussion, the good ideas

will rise to the top and the bad ones will be discarded. In the modern internet age, you

have these powerful platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter that can amplify certain ideas

in a very powerful way and they can suppress ideas like when Twitter kicked Donald Trump,

you know, offered it. I mean, Trump himself said that Twitter was the greatest megaphone

in the world that was free, you know, and it was like he had his own broadcasting channel.

So when they take that away from him, it really does serve to, you know, silence that particular

point of view.

That's okay though, but that's okay.

Well, it's okay because that's not government action. That's private action.

Yeah. So the way the law defines freedom of speech, it's only the government that can

restrict it. But I think in reality, there's other things like these powerful private corporations

that can act like governments because they're so critical to political communication.

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