By: Jay Frost

Jay Frost — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 17:03:05 +0000

Encouraging people to overthrow a democratically elected government that guarantees their freedom of speech is not in any way equivalent to using the power of the human voice to whet a listener’s appetite for bananas. Nor is using a massive personal platform to misinform the public about a pandemic that has killed millions analogous to offending teetotalers with conversations about varieties of wine. These metaphors are just plain wrong. By not taking this seriously, you avoid addressing a tumor within podcasting that has the potential to metastasize into something that prompts external forces to take action none of us want, whether that is in the form of de-platforming (i.e. private parties choosing to disavow content within their space), censorship (e.g. governments halting circulation of content perceived to be a danger to the public), lawsuits that target content creators or their platforms, or worse. The survey results are unsurprising, of course, since none of us want people telling us what we can and cannot say. But that is also because most of us are in fact talking about bananas and wine and all sorts of things that interest us and others. What we are not doing is fomenting a rebellion against the very government that protects our right to discuss whatever we want or “entertaining” people by lying about a disease that has killed hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens. Those actions are akin to yelling fire in a crowded theater. And those who do that sort of thing endanger not only our open society, which gives us the opportunity to use our voices as we wish, but our very liberty and lives as well.

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By: Jay Frost