Censorship Didn’t Start With Social Media
The First Amendment doesn’t protect your Facebook or Twitter account.
The FCC has been regulating broadcast content since, well the birth of the FCC in 1934. To this day it is still not possible to utter a word of profanity on public television without repercussions.
In 1941, President Roosevelt created an Office of Censorship just before the U.S. officially entered Would War II. This office not only had sweeping powers to regulate content, but it could actually arbitrarily shut offending radio stations. The goal of this office was to prevent misinformation, propaganda, or anything that could cause a clear and present danger to America.
More recently, during the Iraq War, President George W. Bush ordered that news content be masked if it potentially revealed troop movement and location. The military didn’t cherry pick — if your story had deemed sensitive, the entire thing was censured.
Very recently, Trump himself ordered gag orders against the EPA and the CDC, prohibiting the use of certain words and phrases — this was further attempted with news networks themselves when he actually tried to censor them on the basis of “fake news.” It didn’t work.
The First Amendment is supposed to — though it has routinely been violated —…
