This kind of shit is precisely why we left Colorado. Excerpt:
On Friday, Colorado Senate President Pro Tempore Kerry Donovan, who is also running to unseat U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), filed S.B. 21-132, a bill to regulate “digital communications.” The bill would create two regulatory agencies to monitor Big Tech companies and penalize them for allowing a person to engage in “unfair or discriminatory digital communications practices,” including promoting “hate speech,” “undermining election integrity,” allowing the spread of “fake news,” and targeting for digital ads.
The bill does not define these hot-button terms, apparently leaving their definition up to the state digital communications division. This Big Tech regulation seems ripe for abuse. It would give cover for Big Tech to censor conservatives in the name of fighting “hate” and “fake news.”
S.B. 21-132 would create a digital communications division and a digital communications commission, tasking these bodies with registering every “digital communications platform” — including “social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and media-sharing platforms like YouTube and Twitch” — and monitoring their activity to prevent “discrimination.”
“The division shall investigate and the commission may hold hearings on” claims alleging that one of these Big Tech companies “has allowed a person to engage in … unfair or discriminatory digital communications practices on the platform,” such as:
- “practices that promote hate speech”
- practices that “undermine election integrity”
- practices that “disseminate intentional disinformation, conspiracy theories, or fake news”
- or practices that “authorize, encourage, or carry out violations of users’ privacy.”
So, a bunch of unelected, unknown, faceless bureaucrats to regulate what we say online. To this, I have only three words in reply: “Fuck off, slavers!”
Actually, that’s not quite right. I do have a few more than three words to reply to that, even though those three go a long damn way towards describing how I really feel about this sack-o-crap. Let’s be forthright, here, for just a moment, about the motives of this asshole Donovan; what he really wants is to silence anyone who disagrees with his own leftist orthodoxy.
If you are a supporter of free speech – really, honestly free speech – that means that it applies to everyone. That means you have to tolerate the microcephalics in the KKK having parades, and put up with that asshole Reverend Wright yelling “God damn America” at his racist pulpit. It means that the worst among us, as well as the best among us, all get their place on the soapbox.
The fact that the soapbox is now digital does not matter, and nobody who understands the idea of free speech should give an ounce of rat’s pee about the means by which that speech is presented.
Kerry Donovan is one of a species of pol that is becoming all too common of late; a little fascist in training, a would-be Napoleonic tyrant who somehow has managed to find his way into the Colorado Capitol when, in a just world, his only deserved portion would be a bucket of tar and a sack of feathers.
There’s your hate speech, Mr. Donovan, you little wannabe totalitarian fuck. Feel free to come on up here to the Sustina Valley and do something about it.
