Free speech for me, not for thee.
(Edit: I thought of a better answer.)
Each successive cancellation wears down the public.
Eventually people start being cancelled and there is no fight back.
It's in the authoritarian playbook. Forgot the page to provide citation.
Once a regulator starts signaling, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way," every media company hears the real message: your license, your merger, your regulatory friction all depend on how much you annoy the people holding the pen. You don't even need explicit orders. A few public threats, a few well-timed approvals or delays, and suddenly "purely financial decisions" just happen to line up with political preferences.
This is soft censorship as a service: you outsource the actual silencing to risk-averse corporations who are already wired to overreact to anything that might jeopardize a multibillion dollar deal. The scary part isn't that a president wants a comedian fired, that's boringly normal. The scary part is when independent agencies stop pretending they're independent and start acting like they report to the comments section on Truth Social.
evolve2k•1h ago
All speach is equal but some speech is more equal than other speech.