Well, not to keep you in suspense, but the answer is no. Greg Bensinger, a member of the New York Times editorial board hitherto unknown to me, has blossomed forth with an opinion piece, “Does Zuckerberg Understand How the Right to Free Speech Works?”, which, alas, only demonstrates, all too conclusively,1 that it is Mr. Bensinger who wallows in ignorance.
Mr. Bensinger’s handle is an “audit”, prepared by someone and given to the New York Times, whose text Mr. Bensinger does not link to and whose authors he only partially identifies—they “include the civil rights advocate Laura Murphy and a team from the law firm Relman Colfax PLLC, led by a partner, Megan Cacace”— though one must remark that the text quoted by Mr. Bensinger sounds an awful lot like the editorial board of the New York Times.
It is the auditors’ and Mr. Bensinger’s single point that the right of free speech only belongs to “good people”. To quote Mr. Bensinger,
Particularly galling, they [the “auditors”] wrote, is Mr. Zuckerberg’s position on so-called political speech, which is allowed to remain on the site even when it is demonstrably false, misleading or sometimes dangerous. Mr. Trump’s warning to protesters in May that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” can only be interpreted as a threat.
“After the company publicly left up the looting and shooting post, more than five political and merchandise ads have run on Facebook sending the same dangerous message that ‘looters’ and ‘antifa terrorists’ can or should be shot by armed citizens,” wrote the auditors …
Yes, it is pretty, or even particularly, “galling” that “so-called political speech” is regarded as particularly precious, thanks, in no small part, one must say, to that stupid, stupid 9-0 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan, whose stupid majority opinion by that stupid Supreme Court Justice William Brennan contained the following stupid, stupid lines:
Thus we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.
In its holding, the Court ruled that Mr. Bensinger’s paper could not be held guilty of libeling a public official merely because it ran a statement that was “demonstrably false, misleading or sometimes dangerous” in someone else’s opinion. The New York Times is now eager to deny to Mr. Zuckerberg the freedom it was once so proud to claim for itself.
Afterwords
President Trump’s behavior during the protests/riots was particularly atrocious, even for him, but arson is a serious crime (St. John’s Church, across from the White House and the scene of Donnie’s Bible hoisting, had been hit by arson), and, shockingly, you do have the right to shoot someone who is looting your store.
