This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough, whose contribution to the MSNBC show mainly involves talking, is now claiming that free speech is “out of date.”
According to a report from Newsbusters, he said that the problem is that non-journalists are using “free speech” to push “hate speech.”
That, he concluded, makes it “out of date.”
Scarborough said, “The idea that this is 1996 and we’re talking about You’ve Got Mail or CompuServe is completely asinine.”
The comments from Scarborough, who was joined by New York Times editorial board member Maray Gay, come as the U.S. Supreme Court reviews whether megacorporations like Google “can be held liable for content posted on their sites.”
“Isn’t it time for Congress to start holding Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and other owners of these, these corporations, just to the same standard that everybody else is held to? Why do we carve things out for – and I would’ve said Jack Dorsey before and I did say that a couple of years ago? This is – it’s just insanity that we’re allowing these billion-dollar corporations to have an exemption that nobody else has,” he said.
Gay said it’s unfortunate that people who are not journalists believe the First Amendment is theirs, too.
“The problem here is that the world has changed, and so to your point, Joe, now you have companies that are actually not journalistic organizations that disseminating information, some of it factual, some of it dangerous, some of it hate speech, and they are, they essentially have no responsibility for the consequences of that,” she said.
She avoided the questions about who is a journalist, and what is hate speech, saying, “For the Americans sitting at home, the question is well, what responsibility should YouTube or Google or Facebook have if they’re promoting hate speech on their platforms?”
Gay noted that the First Amendment is, in fact, “very broad.”
“And of course, as a journalist, that’s a wonderful thing,” he said.
But she said corporations that disseminate “dangerous” or “hate” speech have no consequences.
