Michael Brown on Why We Should be Very Concerned About Censorship

When people as disparate as John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, journalist Piers Morgan, and Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald raise their voices in concern, you know that there’s a problem. A very big problem. Censorship by the giants of media and social media has gotten out of control.

Ted Cruz’s grilling of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has rightly gone viral. Yet the answers given by Dorsey were chilling. To paraphrase, “Even though we blew it, if the New York Post” – yes, the Post, one of the nation’s leading and historic newspapers – “wants to access its account again, it must remove the tweet we don’t like.”

In other words, “Play by the rules we make, as uneven and biased as they may be, or we will silence you. And make no mistake about it. We have that power.”

I remember the first time Facebook shut down one of our ministry’s pages and locked me out, along with our page administrator. We had been falsely accused of hate speech, as a result of which we could not post anything to the page or access our account.

Thankfully, I was given the name of someone within Facebook who helped religious organizations, and after reviewing the complaints, Facebook apologized and reinstated our page.

Michael Brown holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and has served as a professor at a number of seminaries. He is the author of 25 books and hosts the nationally syndicated, daily talk radio show, the Line of Fire.

Still, it was a jarring experience.

You work hard for years to cultivate an audience. You spend thousands of hours posting material and interacting with your followers. You build a constituency and they become your co-workers, sharing your material with others.

And then, suddenly, based on false charges by people who themselves are bigoted, you are shut down. Silenced. Cut off from your constituency. Unable to communicate or even explain what has happened. And if you dare cross the line again – so say the ominous warnings you receive the social media gatekeepers – you will be banned for life.

What kind of power is that? It felt like a personal violation.

But it’s not just the unfair censoring of social media. It’s the media itself, as illustrated by the virtual blackout of the Hunter Biden investigation by the left. It really is frightening.

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SOURCE: Christian Post, Michael Brown