Hello Everyone. I'm Nathan Rich, AKA Hotpot King.
Today, I want to talk to you about Twitter, Trump and freedom of speech.
I don't know if you heard or not, but Twitter started adding fact checks to
the bottom of some of Trump's tweets recently, and the whole Internet has
gone totally crazy.
Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook has spoken out against this, saying, "Twitter
shouldn't be the arbiter of truth," which is quite fascinating to me because
Facebook is doing the exact same type of thing, but much, much more strict.
They decide which groups on Facebook are allowed to continue breaking the
terms of service, for example, all these "hate China" groups.
But at the same time, there's a lot of different words and links that you
just can't share through their platform.
And if you try to, you could even get totally banned completely.
Make no mistake about Mark Zuckerberg's sudden adherence to the concepts of
free speech. He really doesn't care.
If he cared, he would do something about the continuous stream of hate speech
against China on the Facebook platform.
But anyway, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, is trying to fight back against
this. It doesn't really matter what these CEOs are debating about.
That's not really interesting to me.
What's interesting to me is this really highlights a strange, paradoxical
issue within this concept of free speech.
In the United States in particular, we now have this concept that corporations
are people. So corporations can buy candidates because they're just voting.
I mean, they're just people voting with their money.
What's not Democratic about a corporation coming in and giving one candidate
five hundred million dollars and then magically that candidate happens to
always vote for and side with that corporation?
That's just democracy, guys.
There's these corporations that are "people" now, and people in the United
States have free speech, supposedly.
You get this weird situation where Trump is now saying that these corporations
are interfering with his free speech.
But, of course, they have free speech, too, given that corporations are
humans. Technically speaking, the corporations have the right to shut down
his speech because it's just their freedom of speech.
This is something I've been talking about for a very long time.
And a lot of people have complained about this and no one seems to care.
But now that is happening to Trump, suddenly it's his biggest issue.
The problem is this - is not really just about freedom of speech.
It's actually more about the word "freedom.
" This is a word that people really don't seem to understand.
The freedom to do something is not just a personal freedom.
It's a freedom, therefore, to encroach on others.
There's no such thing as a freedom that only affects one person.
It doesn't exist. It's very clear in this example where Twitter's freedom is
actually interrupting Trump's freedom, but it's also found in less obvious
examples as well.
For example, freedom of movement.
If you have the right to go wherever you want, well, if someone else has the
right to go wherever they want, then at some point you may collide.
You're both trying to go to the same place.
One of you has to forfeit rights.
That's the thing about rights.
It's not about you personally.
It's about your interaction with others.
So when I hear that people in the West have freedom of speech, it's a very
interesting thing the way that it's framed as if it's an absolute thing.
"Oh we can just say whatever we want." But here you're seeing a very clear
issue with that, where corporations who are people are "saying whatever they
want" by shutting down or limiting the speech of another person.
And furthermore, to complicate things, corporations in the United States and
parts of Europe and really all over the world, they strive to get
monopolistic control over their industry.
That's kind of the end result of strong capitalism.
If you're constantly trying to do everything you can to become the biggest,
the best, the cheapest, highest quality, most profitable, at some point you
might win that game.
And that makes you the number one in the world in something.
And eventually it makes you potentially the only one in the world in that
area. In many parts of the world, for example, there is no alternative to
Twitter. What are you going to go on to?
Gab? I mean, nobody wants to go onto Gab because if you look up Gab on
Wikipedia or something, it's just like "this is the white supremacist anti
everybody horrible and nightmare platform." And even more importantly, when
you go there, because that's all it's marked up to be, that's really all you
find. So then nobody else goes there.
And if it did get big, Google would probably buy it up and destroy it.
Or Facebook would buy it up and destroy it.
Or Twitter would buy it up and destroy it like they have to so many hundreds
or thousands of other products and companies.
They're maintaining basically a monopoly.
If you don't put your videos on this platform, where are you going to put
them? If you don't put your posts on this platform, where are you going to
put them? Nobody else is on those platforms.
So you have this monopolistic style control.
And then they practice their "free speech" to limit your "free speech." And
then you're left with a situation where one entity has a ton of money and
power and influence and can control everyone's speech under the guise of
their own "free speech.
" So anyway, I just think this is a hilarious and sad issue that we see in
governments, in situations where money is number one and people and even the
government is number two or three.
I'll keep watching this issue, but I just thought I'd share how I see things
like this. It's not even really so much about Trump or Twitter.
It's just a weird paradigm that's built when people think that rights only
apply to themselves.
Like, "I have the right to do something.
Therefore, no one else is affected by this." It's actually a sacrifice to
have a right. Somebody has to sacrifice something for you to have that right
. Anyway, till next time.
Thanks, everybody. Xiexie.