Major cities across the U.S saw their fourth day of protests and riots following the death of Georg Floyd, an African-American man who was killed by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Chauvi was arrested and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter.
Demonstrators have grown violent from Minneapolis, to Atlanta, storming the city streets in the worst nationwide breakout of civil disobedience in decades. All in the midst of a global pandemic. What a year. As churches remain shut down in much of the country, ruthless rioting paid no mind to the ongoing public health emergency that has prompted lockdowns and wrecking the economy as we know it.
Social media is bound to have your friends, neighbors, and colleagues preaching federal statutes and citing old Supreme court cases to bolster their argument that we have to do this or that to protect free speech. You don’t need to be an expert in liability though to know that social media has been corrosive. This has harmed our values and the trust we have between each other. If social media disappeared tomorrow, the country would be better off.
Then there’s Atlanta where protests held the CNN headquarters under siege, lighting cars on fire and smashing windows. Thousands of protestors set police cars on fire in front of the CNN center leading to a massive police presence. Vandalism and a nation unrest.
Why is it that all of this content and the destruction of property do not bear any responsibility on the platforms allowing it to be shared on? They host all manners of content, make a fortune, and then poof. Any obligations to pick up the pieces of chaos afterward diminish. The looting of stores and the violence go viral. It amps up those in other cities to do the same to their community.
In Minneapolis, the carnage continued for a fourth straight day, despite an implemented curfew, after rioters had already burned down nearly an entire precinct including a police station. The violence peaked Thursday night as structures across the city were set ablaze. Protests were also reported in at least Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Paul, Louisville, Dallas, Sacramento, Bakersfield, San Jose, and Columbus.
Further south in Washington D.C., things appeared to escalate into larger scale violence as only secret service and riot police separate the protestors from the White House. Yet Twitter and the other Liberal tech giants are a cancer on our body politick. They don’t operate like traditional publishers. Twitter allows this violent content to be shared but tries to censor a tweet President Trump wrote about vote-by-mail ballot scams? It makes no sense.
Let’s hope we get back to an Internet without comment sections, Twitter mobs, and without aggressively politicized social media companies. The Dem’s are walking a pretty thin line at this point but social media will be right there to give them a great big hug.
