Bill Gates should check out slug!

Consider this quote from the Parler CEO:

"It's not yet against the law to think for yourself. People with differences in opinions should have discussions not censorship," he wrote on the platform today.
"Our leaders who push for authoritarian measures to control speech online are fighting for an evil cause. Handing our version of 'truth' to a handful of ideological fact checkers creates increased centralization of power... fact checkers of history called Tesla a hack, said Einstein was a fraud and they believed in witches. Fact checking is wrong."

And then recall what the late, great Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

Without a shared set of factual assumptions, such as, for instance, "Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust", "Al Qaeda carried out 9/11", "there is a global pandemic caused by the Covid-19 virus", "Joe Biden won the election of 2020", we are increasingly not going to have a national conversation; we're going to have splinter groups, each with their own "alternative facts" (and what is the "alternative" to facts? it used to be "falsehoods" ), all talking past one another instead of to one another. Providing a "safe space" for those groups to purvey lies- and let us be frank here, we're not talking about differences of opinions, we're talking about lies about what happened historically and what is happening right now- does no-one a service except for those who have an ideological interest in furthering the worldview that those lies support.