A few recent polls show that the way Democrats feel about their fellow citizens’ free speech rights is horribly uncertain. The Left’s openness to heterodox ideas or challenges to their positions also appears very low. And making fun of them is beyond the pale. The Washington Post calling journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss conservatives is a stunning example of their inability to handle any dissent from their orthodoxy. It is also apparent that the disclosures in the Twitter Files are not impacting how many Americans view social media censorship.
According to Rasmussen, 77% of likely U.S. voters believe it’s likely that social media companies like Facebook censor news and commentary because of political bias, including 52% who think it is very possible. Sixty-six percent of voters also approve of GOP plans to investigate social media censorship, including 43% who strongly support it. Those findings indicate a high degree of agreement on free speech principles, but the details do not bear that out.
Seventy-two percent of participants think censorship by social media companies is a serious problem, including 49% who say it’s a very serious one. Yet, 73% of voters also believe misinformation on social media is a serious problem, including 48% who say it’s a severe one.
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However, when you look at the data by political affiliation, it is easy to see how priorities on these two issues differ. According to the pollster:
More Republicans think censorship is a Very Serious problem (69%) than view misinformation as a Very Serious problem (42%). By contrast, significantly more Democrats see misinformation as a Very Serious problem (57%) than say the same about censorship (32%). Among voters not affiliated with either major party, 49% say censorship by social media companies is a Very Serious problem, slightly more than the 45% who see misinformation as a Very Serious problem.
Far more Republicans (70%) than Democrats (39%) or unaffiliated voters (49%) say it’s Very Likely that social media companies like Facebook censor news and commentary because of political bias.
Republicans are far more likely (86%) to support GOP plans to investigate the social media giants than Democrats (52%). The information reported by Taibbi and Bari Weiss from the Twitter Files clearly supports the Republican point of view. From the suppression of Hunter Biden’s laptop story to @LibsofTikTok to the banning of Donald Trump, the left-wing leadership at Twitter became increasingly drunk on their own power.
Their decision-making conversations in Slack demonstrated how their thinking evolved. Leaders went from twisting rules to fit their preferred action to believing they could infer intent and predict outcomes to justify suppressing, hiding, and banning accounts. Yet, thanks to the legacy media’s silence on the details in the Twitter Files, facts about the situation under previous Twitter leadership are not breaking through generally. That, or Democrats agree with the censorship.
A new poll from Convention of States and the Trafalgar Group indicates that could be the case. It showed large majorities of Independents (78.6%) and Republicans (93.9%) are excited about or indifferent to the fact that accounts banned by Twitter have returned. The examples used in the poll were Dr. Jordan Peterson and The Babylon Bee. They were banned for calling a transgender person their biological sex or “dead naming.” Both are back on the platform.
Peterson is a clinical psychologist who writes books about bringing purpose and meaning into your life. They tend to appeal to young men and advise achieving meaning in hard work. The Babylon Bee is a satire site that often can’t be distinguished from reality within a few months. A majority of Democrats are opposed to them returning to the public discourse on Twitter.
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Only 3% of Democrats are excited that Peterson and The Babylon Bee are returning, and 31.1% can find their way to being indifferent. Nearly two-thirds, 65.8%, say they oppose it. To put a fine point on it, a significant majority of Democrats see helping young men and acknowledging the basic biological fact that sex is an immutable characteristic as a bridge too far. Or they have internalized the “misinformation” about both accounts from the legacy media.
“Most Americans believe in free speech, as evidenced by this and other polling research,” said Mark Meckler, President of the Convention of States. His own organization released polling last week that showed 71% of Democrats saying they were less likely to do business with companies like Apple if they helped the Chinese government censor citizen-led protests. Apparently, more than two-thirds feel Chinese citizens have the right to free speech. Nearly the same number don’t think a Canadian doctor and the Bee’s satirists do.
Based on the results about accounts returning to Twitter, Meckler observed, “There’s a growing minority on the left who don’t share those values and don’t want to hear dissenting voices, which is deeply disturbing for a free society and tends more towards totalitarianism. The best antidote to this misguided view is what Elon Musk is doing right now in cleaning up and opening up Twitter.”
He continued, “Twitter’s radical shake up was long in coming and needed to happen, and when the dust settles, folks with common sense will see that transparency and freedom are always the best policy. Musk will let Twitter’s success shape public opinion over the long haul.”
We should all hope that Meckler is correct because it is unclear how citizens with such radically different views of the Overton Window can continue negotiating a way to live together under one government.
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