Commentary on “deplatforming” and free speech

William Jacobson:

You know, it’s not quite deplatforming, but we’re, there’s no question we’re throttled on Facebook and Twitter. I mean, perfect example. We, every Christmas Eve for years, we used to post a post that I wrote, called Christmas Eve in the Ardennes about U.s. soldiers on Christmas Eve during the Battle of the Bulge, always a huge hit on Facebook. I mean, four, five, 6,000 shares, which for our page is pretty good. All of a sudden, a couple of years ago they started throttling us and now we get 50 shares, 70 shares. They don’t show our stuff to anybody. We have 350,000 followers on Facebook. We’re lucky if they show our content to three or 4,000 people. So there’s deplatforming in a different way.

Coleman (19:07):

So Bill, you know, you’re a lawyer, your background is a securities lawyer, certainly you understand a thing or two about supply and demand and how markets work. Isn’t it astonishing that companies would agree to throttle the sales. And we have to think of every page was a sale for them. Every engagement is a sale for them to their own customers, to their own users, to reduce the options of what they offer to their customers. It seems so counterintuitive to what guys, our age grew up learning about how markets work

Jacobson (19:48):

Well. They’re so big, to them, there’s no market. There really is no alternative to Facebook. There’s not. There are pockets where you can reach a specific audience, but there’s no alternative to Facebook. There’s no alternative to Twitter. There’s just not, I mean, there are, you know, Facebook of course bought Instagram, which might have been a competitor to Facebook. So there’s not, there is no market force here. They can do whatever they want.

And one thing we’ve always covered since day one is this campus culture, this campus anti-free speech culture, cancel culture before they called it cancel culture. and how it has migrated into big tech. All the crazy stuff that you thought was like, so out of line 10, 12 years ago on campus that you read about it, Oberlin college or someplace like that, well guess where those people are working. Now, those students are now in their late twenties and early thirties, and they’re in positions of responsibility at major tech companies. And they’ve brought those campus anti-free speech values to high tech and that’s obvious and to public at the public education….