Under Congress' klieg lights, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg tried to defend his company's plans to launch a digital currency, while politicians laid into him for not policing paid and unpaid political speech more aggressively.
Here, we sympathize with Zuckerberg, whose business has run roughshod over privacy rights, has dominated the advertising business and invites serious antitrust scrutiny: While a company built to facilitate communications, that enables billions upon billions of interactions a day, must do more to purge clearly bigoted speech, terrorist incitement, malicious deepfake videos, foreign money meddling in American elections and other outright lawbreaking, it should ban content only in extreme cases, and stay far away from picking partisan sides.
Policing of political speech for truthfulness is a dangerous road to go down.
Meantime, another tech giant, Apple, showed what can happen when a corporation too easily bends to a government's will to purge content it considers dangerous: Knuckling under to Beijing's pressure, Apple deleted from its App Store the HKmap.live, which had been a vital tool for Hong Kong's protesters to avoid police and locate demonstrations.
Err on the side of freedom. These days, that's what qualifies as thinking different.
