How Would Senator James Lankford React If A Democratic Senator Demanded Fox News Explain Its Editorial Policies?
from the intimidation-through-stupidity dept
A month ago, we wrote about a bizarre, nonsensical, Twitter rant from Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma that followed a bizarre, nonsensical appearance at the CPAC conference in which he lashed out at “big tech” for supposedly “censoring conservatives.” This fact-free grievance has been an item of blind faith among the Trumpist set, that big tech is somehow out to get them. The smart ones know it’s not true, but it plays well to the base, so they play it up. The dumb ones truly believe it, even as the evidence shows that Twitter and Facebook both have actually bent over backwards to give Republican politicians more leeway to violate the rules and not face any enforcement actions.
Still, a few weeks back, YouTube removed some videos from CPAC, not because of any anti-conservative bias, but for violating YouTube’s election integrity policy. You know what that means. YouTube has a policy that says you can’t mislead people about the election, and a bunch of Trumpists at CPAC whipped up the base into a frenzy with baseless conspiracy theories about the election.
Personally, I think YouTube should leave that content up. At some point, in the future, it’s going to be important to study the collective madness that has taken over much of the Republican party, causing it to completely throw out any semblance of principles, and start coasting on purely fictitious grievance culture wars, in which they must always be portrayed as the aggrieved victim. It would be nice to have a clear record of that.
However, YouTube has chosen to go in another direction and to actually enforce its policies, meaning a few such videos were removed. And, of course, this played right into the nonsense, fictitious grievance politics of the principle-less Republican Party, which sent out its derpiest politicians to whine about being censored.
Lankford, apparently, not humiliated enough by the nonsense he said on stage, has decided to double down, sending Google CEO Sundar Pichai a hilariously stupid letter, demanding to know why CPAC videos have been removed. The letter is like a greatest hits of wrongness and “that’s not how any of this works.” It accuses Google of censorship of conservative voices, it confuses Section 230, and asks all sorts of detailed questions about YouTube’s process that resulted in the videos being removed.
I could go through it bit by bit explaining how ridiculous each part of the letter is, but you can just read it yourself below and see.
But, just to demonstrate how ridiculous this letter is, all you have to do is replace “YouTube” with “Fox News” and replace any concept of “censorship of conservatives” with “failure to present liberal perspectives” and you might see how unhinged this letter is. I think if a Democratic Senator, say Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar, for example, sent a letter to Fox News saying:
It has come to my attention that Fox News recently refused to allow any liberal or Democratic commentators comment on Joe Biden’s performance, and did not provide any details why it is only presenting one side of the story concerning the federal government
And then demanding details on how Fox News goes about choosing what viewpoints are allowed to air, Senator Lankford, and tons of Republicans would absolutely freak out. And rightly so. No politician should be demanding to know the editorial decision making process of private media companies. To demand such information is a clear intimidation technique and should be seen as a violation of the 1st Amendment.
Senator Lankford has every right to spread nonsense, whether he believes it or not. But he doesn’t have the right, as a government official, to demand to know the editorial process of a private media company. Just as Senator Warren or Klobuchar should not and would not have the right to do the same for Fox News.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, anti-conservative bias, content moderation, editorial policies, election integrity, intimidation, james lankford, sundar pichai
Companies: google, youtube
Comments on “How Would Senator James Lankford React If A Democratic Senator Demanded Fox News Explain Its Editorial Policies?”
Maybe take the gloves off?
Lankford, apparently, not humiliated enough by the nonsense he said on stage, has decided to double down, sending Google CEO Sundar Pichai a hilariously stupid letter, demanding to know why CPAC videos have been removed.
At this point everyone should really stop treating people like Lankford as honest individuals with valid points and just answer honestly.
‘We took the videos down because we have rules against lying about elections and no amount of delusions, lying and/or pandering to Trump will change the fact that the election was valid, he lost both the popular vote and the electoral college and all the dozens of cases arguing otherwise have been laughed out of court as unsubstantiated. If you want to argue otherwise you can do it on other platforms as we’ll not be allowing you to lie and attempt to undermine trust in the democratic system on ours.’
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I think a better cheeky reply would be to simply quote nothing but the text of the 1st ammendment.
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Followed by his oath when taking office?
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Along with Exodus 23:1-3
You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, siding with the many, so as to pervert justice, nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit.
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That would certainly be a funny way to explain why they have the right to remove the videos but if the company really felt like twisting the knife they’d still need to make clear why the videos were removed, hence my suggestion.
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^^^ And what makes you think that he’d understand? Either 1A itself, or why it was used as a response. Current indications are that he’d simply blow a gasket, and call out the Whine Brigade.
Best to ignore him directly, and instead send a short missive to his people – they’re the ones getting paid to take his shit, no matter what he says.
Or my favorite: Offer to buy him for what he thinks he’s worth, and then sell him for what he’s actually worth. Then write off the humongous loss on my taxes.
Thereby reducing the Federal incoming tax revenues by no small amount.
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Along with the Second Amendment.
Yes, I know. But once in a while, it’d be nice for these white supremacists to know the consequences of their actions.
Even if no one sane would do it.
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If the pen is mightier than the sword, and one can use words as weapons, does that mean Republicans should be forced to stop censoring free speech because of the 2nd Amendment?
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Hopefully he does get the hint. Not that hopeful he will, sadly.
Hint being, “Once you use your fucking powers as a Senator to start censoring speech you don’t like, the American public MAY assume you are a tyrant and act accordingly, ie, shoot you.”
Where we disagree
YOU SAY: “But he doesn’t have the right, as a government official, to demand to know the editorial process of a private media company. Just as Senator Warren or Klobuchar should not and would not have the right to do the same for Fox News.”
Lankford is a member of a 100 member legislative body. He has no ability to do anything on his own. And he has every “right” under the First Amendment to demand anything he damn well pleases, writing as an individual and even on his Senate letterhead, as a way of expressing his displeasure. So do Warren and Klobuchar.
Now, if he were a committee chair, issuing a subpoena (that is to say, employing government power) that would be a different matter.
No wonder the First Amendment won your “misunderstood legal ideas” bracket.
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I highly suggest you google “Bantam Books v. Sullivan” and read the decision vis-à-vis the constitutionality of the government using its speech to aim to suppress speech without prior restraint.
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The position of government office carries weight and to have them applying pressure directly(‘Do this’) or indirectly(‘Since you did something I don’t like I’m going to drag you over the coals for it’) carries a much bigger impact than a non-government agent doing the same and when that impacts speech related issues the first amendment comes into play.
Unless you want to argue that a company will feel no more pressure from a letter sent by a current senator than your average citizen who sends a letter of demands to a company very much matters.
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The irony of this hypocritical accusation is delicious.
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The letter he sent was unambiguously giving the impressions that he was writing as a sitting senator which means that his free speech rights are indeed limited (see Garcetti vs Ceballos).
If he was speaking as a private citizen he shouldn’t have used the senate stationary and signing it with “United States Senator”.
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Ethically, any sitting Senator should NOT be doing this. Regardless of whether they are speaking in a private capacity or not.
The most that our hypothetical Senator is allowed to say is that he is not happy with how a private entity is running things.
Sorry, but I see this all the time in Singapore and the political court cases are overwhelmingly in favor of the sitting minister abusing that conveniently written loophole in Singapore law. Yes, there’s MORE context to this I don’t care to go into.
That’s how you get SLAPP on a Federal level.
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I understand where you’re coming from, but I think that a Senator sending a letter creates an implicit threat, saying (1) if you don’t do as I say, we may take other, gov’t backed actions against you and (2) with the chilling effects of scaring others from doing things in the future, would trip the Bantam Books line of government intimidation, even absent any specific legal action.
This is similar to the Dart v. Backpage case, where I think Posner was correct, that the 1st Amendment speech rights of gov’t officials take a back seat when they use those to silence private actors, or to imply potential punishment for private actors over their speech choices. As Posner wrote there:
Re: Re: state self-restraint
It’s part of democracy’s essence, that the state (and its agencies) restrains itself. The British expression, “An Englishman’s house is his castle” means that the state is not permitted to breach that without giving good reason to an independent authority with the power to turn down such requests. The problem with gun-happy cops is precisely that – the power of life and death is supposed to be rationed, not splurged. And so the power of an official, even if said official is supposed to be proving oversight to the state’s operations, is not without limit.
It’s elementary civics. I learned that in primary school.
Dear Senator Lankford,
Someone in your office is sending idiotic letters to the media, probably to make you look bad.
Yours,
A faithful Constituent
An appropriate response
I think he should just send back a copy of the Bill of Rights and a note that says, “I’m not going to do your homework for you.”
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If YouTube truly wanted to remove “misinformation” or “misleading content,” The Young Turks and Vox would have been purged years ago.
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And tons of other stuff. It isn’t about just anything that is misleading or outright lies. Sure, they could give it a “context” blurb, but they aren’t going to bother for everything. They bother for highly consequential bullshit, +/- takedowns and stayups which aare the result of trying to moderate at the gigascale.
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If you weren’t an ignorant sheep, you’d already know that TYT is one of the most highly restricted channels on youtive, with 71% of videos restricted vs pure lies like PrageUwU only managing 12%.
And that’s not bothering with your Vox projection.
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It doesn’t even try to remove all or even most misleading content and misinformation; only ones on things that are on the extreme end and actually matter. Stuff like the election, the pandemic, MMS, advice to take something dangerous like turpentine, or vaccines.
Generally, YouTube doesn’t like to be in the position where it decides what is or isn’t true. It only does so where the truth is exceptionally clear and where the falsehoods are actually dangerous and/or extreme, and even then, it prefers to put a blurb for more information (like with the Flat Earth, evolution, etc.) rather than take the video down completely.
At any rate, TYT has its videos restricted more than any other significant political or journalistic YouTube channel, so it’s not like it’s being left alone. However, it doesn’t do anything like promote vast conspiracies, advocate killing anyone, try to subvert the results of an election, or condone people who participate in an insurrection. Is it biased? Absolutely. Does it get things wrong? Certainly. Does it present a potentially misleading perspective on things? Undoubtedly. I’m pretty sure that even they’d admit the first two things. However, it doesn’t go as far as what people pushing conspiracies about the 2020 election have done, so YouTube (to my knowledge) doesn’t completely remove their videos.
This is a false equivalence and is based on a flawed premise at that.
“How Would Senator James Lankford React If A Democratic Senator Demanded Fox News Explain Its Editorial Policies? ”
Completely unsurprised by Fox’s explanation, at least if he has half a brain. Okay, he’d be shocked.
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He’d be one of the first to say that Fox News does not have to explain it, because guess which megacorp pays for their SuperPACs and reelection campaigns?
No, it’s not Koch Industries and their web of “trusts” and “thinktanks”.
Sadly it won’t matter to the faithful.
To submit the exact same demand to Faux News would then be held out as an over reach by the woke left to do something horrible.
“It’s only bad when THEY do it.” is amazing cognitive dissonance that has been accepted by far to many people.
They no longer have to play fair & the democrats are STILL trying to pretend that the republicans will somehow get decorum to win the day.
And before you harp on that, yes both sides are guilty of bullshit like this & its unacceptable. The founders spinning in their graves could power the entire nation at this point.
Abuse of office should be punished.
Failing their oath to protect & uphold the Constitution should be punished.
Wheelchair Hitler Youth should be called out on his cocaine orgy comments.
MTG who claims her comments are jokes about killing other members, then calls the capitol police on Jimmy Kimmel… false reports should be punished.
If it is unacceptable that the other side does it, it should be unacceptable period.
But then CPAC is hosting a White Christian Nationalist conference to celebrate a ‘strongman’ who screwed with the election & wants to get rid of everyone who isn’t white & christian from his country… I wish they would just all move there instead of trying to remake ‘Merica into Whitepeoplestan.
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Unfortunately, some of the crazies have openly admitted they want to kill us all on some news sites.
All this while the entire Republican Party gets away with insurrection.
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“Trumpists.” Yeah, this article isn’t biased.
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Techdirt is an opinion blog. What gave you the impression it wasn’t?
Re: OK, I'll bite....
…. what do you call the members of a cult who slavishly follow someone so deadly towards his own followers as to make Jim Jones look like a Choir Boy? Personally, I favor ‘Trumpistas’, but that’s likely to be taken as an insult by those of the Central American persuasion.
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I go with MAGAts myself as it seems fitting for such deplorable people and while the comparison may be somewhat insulting to actual maggots I’m sure that they are strong enough to deal with it without endless whining.
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I like your term, it certainly leaves no doubt, but… I’m thinking that being able to drag his name directly into the ground has some cache, no?
I also think that it won’t be another generation, and the very word ‘trump’ will be frowned upon, even insofar as playing games such as Hearts, Spades, etc. IOW, I’m predicting that it may well come to the point where we don’t ‘trump’ someone’s hand and win, we suffer a ‘trump’, and lose the hand, or the game.
But I’m looking at the long game… I probably won’t be around long enough to see that happen. Schade.
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NeoNazis? Traitors to America? Confederates?
I dunno, there’s quite a few appropriate ones.
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Personally I favor the term redcaps as a reference to the cruel murderous
variant of fairies.
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I’m afraid waving a crucifix, reciting Bible verses and avoiding ruined castles or abandoned military areas won’t banish these clear and present threats to America and the world.
A murderous fairy is dangerous, but at least we know how to deal with them or avoid them. We can’t ignore the NeoNazis forever, not while their toxic ideology is out in the wild poisoning countries outside of America.
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I prefer “Trumpettes” because they act like miniature Trumps only dumber, (Though I’m not sure how they can do that when to be dumber than trump you would figure they would be so stupid that they would be dead from forgetting to breath!)
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Trumpalos, because they worship an insane clown.
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What would you prefer I call the people who seem to be supporters of Trump?
And, it’s an opinion website. Of course it’s biased. It’s biased towards what we want to write about. And sometimes I want to write about idiot politicians being idiots.
There’s an experiment to run
Some Senator should send Fox that letter, modified as suggested, just to get a catalog of the ensuing outrage.
Then use that as counterpoint whenever this shit comes up in original form.
you are under the mistaken impression...
that a Republican Senator would care about being a blatant hypocrite. Sen. Lankford, should a Democratic Senator criticize Fox “News” in the same way his letter attacks Youtube and Google, would condemn that Democratic senator wholeheartedly and vigorously. Being a hypocrite is not a ‘bug’ for Republicans, it is a proud ‘feature’. They are not only hypocrites – the are loud and proud about it.
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Perhaps, but it’s still worthwhile to call them out on it just in case someone might be otherwise fooled into thinking they have a valid point.
Aim Higher
Pretty black and white: “We aspire to be like those regimes!”
Actually:
I’d somewhat support that. Be it CNN or FNC or OAN. If news is in your name you’re advertising a service. If you fail to transmit news it is false advertising.
No?