Originally Posted by
CaptUSA
Germany’s Merkel hits out at Twitter over ‘problematic’ Trump ban
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/11/germ...trump-ban.html
LONDON — German Chancellor Angela Merkel blasted Twitter’s decision to ban U.S. President Donald Trump.
“The right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance,” Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s chief spokesman, told reporters in Berlin on Monday, according to Reuters.
“Given that, the chancellor considers it problematic that the president’s accounts have been permanently suspended.”
Seibert said that, while Twitter was right to flag Trump’s inaccurate tweets about the 2020 U.S. election, banning his account altogether was a step too far.
He added that governments, not private companies, should decide on any limitations to freedom of speech.
In other words, Seibert (and by extension, Merkel) doesn't have a problem with what Twitter is doing so much as he has a problem with it being done by someone other than the government. So presumably, it would be less objectionable for the U.S. government to make everyone do exactly the same thing Twitter is doing, rather than for Twitter et al. to do it on their own.
Whatever one might think about the status of Twitter, et al. as "private" entities, Seibert's sentiment is pretty much the exact opposite of the meaning and intent of the First Amendment ...
Only Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
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