“Liberals have become too censorious and too willing to use their cultural and corporate and political power to suppress ideas and products that offend them.”
In an exclusive interview with the New York Times Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) slammed Big Tech for banning former President Trump from their platforms, said it makes him feel "uncomfortable" and Big Tech shouldn’t have that much "power."
Ezra Klein, host of the New York Times Opinion podcast The Ezra Klein Show, interviewed Senator Sanders where they discusses a wide range of topics from cancel culture to Big Tech censorship and the current Biden administration.
During the interview, the Socialist Senator made stunning remarks about cancel culture when asked if he thought "liberals have become too censorious and too willing to use their cultural and corporate and political power to suppress ideas and products that offend them."
On "cancel culture," and the power of tech platforms: pic.twitter.com/piEPMOopmr
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein)
"Look, you have a former president in Trump, who was a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, an authoritarian, somebody who doesn’t believe in the rule of law. This is a bad-news guy. But if you’re asking me, do I feel particularly comfortable that the then-president of the United States could not express his views on Twitter? I don’t feel comfortable about that," explained Bernie Sanders.
"Now, I don’t know what the answer is. Do you want hate speech and conspiracy theories traveling all over this country? No. Do you want the internet to be used for authoritarian purposes and an insurrection, if you like? No, you don’t," said Sanders. "So how do you balance that? I don’t know, but it is an issue that we have got to be thinking about. Because yesterday it was Donald Trump who was banned, and tomorrow, it could be somebody else who has a very different point of view."
Sanders concluded "I don’t like giving that much power to a handful of high-tech people. But the devil is obviously in the details, and it’s something we’re going to have to think long and hard on."
Although Sanders is a Socialist, who's ideal policies strip freedoms from citizens and place them under total government control, he is one of the first members of the Democratic party to take a stand against censorship and admit that the censorship of former President has the ability to embark down a dark path for the country.
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