Ross: Perhaps we could learn to control ourselves on social media
Oct 29, 2020, 6:08 AM | Updated: 9:09 am

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testifies remotely during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing with big tech companies Oct. 28, 2020 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The committee is discussing reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. (Photo by Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images)
(Photo by Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images)
It happened at a VIRTUAL Senate committee hearing called by Republicans to complain that conservative voices are being censored on the internet.
The image of Senator Ted Cruz looked directly at the image of CEO Jack Dorsey and demanded to know: “Who the hell elected you?”
Very strange – Ted Cruz is a conservative who believes in capitalism; he must know that the idea of workers electing their supervisors is straight out of Karl Marx.
But then this whole issue is full of contradictions.
We want social media companies to protect us from outside interference in the election, to take down racist content, and yet here’s a senator – in the name of free speech – wanting to STOP Twitter from controlling its content.
But perhaps we could learn to control ourselves! For example, must we comment about EVERYTHING? Does every page have to feel like Yelp? Must we all be in search of the perfect takedown? Because it’s not working. The more we try to cancel each other out, the more complicated the equation gets.
When I got into broadcasting, you could choose the station – and how loud it was. That was it. Today, you can choose the station, the volume, the topic, the viewpoint, the font, the obscenity level, cookie acceptance … it’s a land of total freedom, where the police were defunded long ago … and yet, Utopia seems a long way off.
Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on Xվ Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.