A former official from the Biden administration is calling for the silencing of online free speech at a time when the country is mourning the senseless murder of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, who was killed while exercising his First Amendment right to free speech.
Speaking on Wednesday on CBS Mornings, Laura Edelson, a former chief technologist at the Biden-led Department of Justice, used the reaction to Kirk’s murder to demand more censorship from social media companies. Edelson blamed pro-free speech moves at Meta and X for the quick spread of “bad information” online, claiming they were “absolutely” responsible.
“This was a conscious choice that several platforms made—most notably, obviously, X, but also Meta's platforms—to make a shift from, you know, having things like fact checking, from having measures in place that would allow, you know, hate speech, violence to be deaccelerated by the algorithm and to have trust and safety teams that would build systems that would, again, deamplify polarizing content,” Edelson said, adding: “This was a business decision that they made. And this is the result.”
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