National Rifle Association succeeds in censoring parody

All it took for the National Rifle Association (NRA) to kill a parody video was to issue a legal complaint based on trademark law. The Yes Men, a pair of progressive disrupters, created the parody that announced an NRA program to provide guns to those too poor to buy their own. (Motherboard, June 29, 2016, by Sarah Jeong)

Mike Masnick, techdirt, June 30, 2016, writes that Communications Decency Act 230 (CDA) creates immunity for platforms and should have prevented the censorship: “It’s not so much because it [CDA] helps the companies who run those platforms, but rather because it protects the free speech of the individuals who use those platforms. Without those protections, the default response from many platform providers is “take it all down.” It’s a recipe for censorship. It’s a recipe for shutting down controversial speech or different ideas or even just the places one can go to speak those ideas. And, no matter what you think of the NRA or the Yes Men, you should be concerned about the 37,999 other sites that were down for a while, all because a big trade group wasn’t happy with a parody.”

 

One Comment

  • I don’t agree with the NRA putting firearms in the hands of poor people for protection. That is insane. But I do think that disarming the public is just one of the steps to socialism. 1st you take away their health care and make the people depend on the government,its all about control. I think the NRA is meaning for the ordinary citizen to be able to stand up for themselves. The police need to protect the public, we need to support them. The Al Sharptons, KKK, Black Panthers Militant groups of all kinds need to be stopped.Don’t just blame the NRA. Politicians need to be held to the same rules and laws as everyone else.

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