Free speech on the internet

Well, I guess I was wrong. I thought Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey did a good thing when he banned political ads. In Breitbart, Ted Cruz explains why I was wrong.

Cruz ran an op-ed in the Hill, praising Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for preserving political speech on his platform. In contrast, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he would ban political ads on the social media giant.

The senator said that he believes this contrast serves an “incredibly important decision point in Silicon Valley” on the question of free speech on the Internet.

Cruz said that Dorsey’s banning of political ads on Twitter “is a terrible decision for free speech.”

The senator said that if “there are no political ads [on Twitter], that means that the only voices that will be allowed are incumbent politicians who naturally have big platforms; without paid ads it becomes incredibly difficult for a challenger to beat an incumbent. Number two, the mainstream media will have huge megaphones and others are silenced from view.”

Cruz said that Twitter’s banning of political ads will “silence the ability of anyone to speak.”

Cruz concluded, “Twitter’s political ad ban does not just extend to political candidates, it extends to individual citizens. If you want to speak on free speech, on religious liberty, on the Second Amendment, you want to speak on climate change, you want to speak on life, you want to speak on Israel, you can’t put out an ad on anything. Imagine if other media outlets did that, it would leave the only voices such as the mainstream media.”

Read more here.