Steven Bartlett

You now have the president.

attempting to change media ownership.

And you're beginning to see what happens when the administration goes into universities and you can't teach this course.

You can't hire that teacher.

That was the deal that was given to Harvard, I don't know, some months back.

The reason why Harvard wound up refusing to deal with the Trump administration and when it started to sue them was because the administration was trying to actually decide who would teach what courses at Harvard.

I don't believe there's a precedent for that.

But I agree with you that it is an illiberal instinct to try to control speech.

And there's a left-wing version of it and there's a right-wing version of it.

And the people who are really in favor of free speech and they're vanishingly few are the people who are willing to call it out on both sides.

And one of the things you often hear now from these so-called free speech warriors is that they're perfectly happy to shout about the left canceling people or left-wing rhetoric that they don't like.

But then they keep quiet when it comes from the other side.

So there is a difference between someone sending you an email and saying, you know, look, this has been flagged by a monitoring group as maybe fake or as maybe Russian disinformation or as, you know, coming from some kind of foreign influence campaign.

And so, you know, it would be great if you took it down or demoted it.

And there's a difference between that and taking over the company in order that the president gets to dictate what's on it.

Nobody coerced Meta into doing anything.

Or Twitter.

Nobody said, you know, Twitter will pay a fine if you don't do X or Y. In the context of people looking for foreign influence campaigns, there were conversations about what was appropriate to print and what wasn't.

So Section 230 essentially allows the platforms to escape the rules that newspapers, for example, have to abide by.

So actually we do have regulations.