Should OpEdNews, a progressive news and opinion site, publish articles by right wingers?
Should a progressive site help right wingers get out their message and expand their reach, possibly giving them added credibility, especially for outright dishonest or extremely prejudiced viewpoints. Should a progressive site publish claims that are unsupported and hateful?
Some people will argue that refusal to publish such content is censorship. I give those people no shrift. Censorship is not applicable to publishers. It is applicable for government and I'm coming to believe that censorship also applies to venues that are supposed to allow all voices. That includes major monopolist or oligopolist megaplatform sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Apple (like iTunes) and other similar sites. It also includes most Universities.
The way I see it, publishers have the right and responsibility to curate their content. Readers expect content curation. They expect editors to exercise some influence over what content is published. Here at OpEdnews, we generally won't publish pro-gun articles. We won't publish articles that are anti abortion. Why? We don't want to give those messages any support. We don't want to help the messengers. That's our right as a publisher.
But it's different for the megaplatforms. it is not their job to curate or censor. It is their job to be open platforms, with the exception of clear cut cases of hate.
It's also different for Universities, especially public universities. They are supposed to be open places for ideas, even ones abhorrent to one ideological side.
It is dangerous to freedom of speech when megaplatforms or universities engage in censorship.
It is normal and natural for publishers to curate content selectively.
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet (more...)
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