The Trump White House this week unveiled a new initiative that will allow right-wingers to report when they feel they've been banned from social media on specious grounds.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown, a writer for the libertarian magazine Reason, has written an essay that brutally ridicules conservatives for whining about being "censored" by social media companies -- and she compares them to the overly sensitive college students that right-wingers regularly deride as "snowflakes."
"It's tempting to merely laugh at this sort of absurdity, to gawk at the blubbering fools who spent years ranting about easily-triggered liberal 'snowflakes' only to literally make it a federal matter when their Facebook account gets suspended," she writes. "And sure, the self-owning MAGAservative chorus of 'No one liked my tweet, I must be shadowbanned!' is a special delicacy."
Brown goes on to point out, however, that there are some very serious ramifications for free speech in the United States if these efforts are successful.
"Right now, too many Republicans want us to think it's a First Amendment violation for a private company to dictate the terms of service on a private platform it owns, but not for the federal government to dictate what individuals can and cannot say on those platforms or to punish private companies that don't conform to some Congress-created speech code," she writes. "I know it's clichéd and melodramatic to make 1984 references, but this is some really serious doublethink."
