phang show this morning. with all of our live tv grand lands, i ll see you tomorrow morning at 7 am eastern. velshi starts right now. good morning to you, particularly early morning here in arizona, it is saturday october the 29th. i m ali velshi in phoenix, arizona for another edition of velshi across america. only ten days left in this midterm election, cycle this worst first nation since donald trump began spreading the big lie, following his lost of joe biden in 2020. that lie, of a stolen election that wasn t stolen, fueled the violent insurrection at the capitol on january 6th. it is still spinning off new lives today, creating an atmosphere in which the future of democracy itself remains in doubt. the threat of violence, and intimidation hangs in the air. particularly here in maricopa county arizona. on the day that the mob swarmed the cat bottle, roz on january six, some carried rough vince assaulted wang forsman s officers, many of them were explicitly looking fo
first amendment approach. trying to adopt the constraints on government to a private platform like twitter. i think it s important remember when the first memos written, you can supercharge the spread of disinformation. life just wasn t like that. now, you can put garbage out there and within a millisecond it is everywhere with a whole bunch of people retweeting it faster than you even knew it went out. suzanne, good to see you as always, thank you for writing that article. thank you so much for all you do at pet america. obviously with the book club, we depend on a lot of the work that you do so we are grateful for you. suzanne is also the author of dare to speak, defending free speech for all. all right, which is ten days to go into the midterms, i m here in phoenix, an arizona version of velshi across america. up next, you re gonna hear my conversation with a group of arizona s, republicans and democrats. one of the most enlightening moments was when we discuss the importance of v
banned attacks will not be allowed back and tell a content moderation panel is formed. joining me now is susan, she is the ceo of pan america, she is the author of dare to speak, defending free speech for all. she has a new opinion piece in the los angeles times titled, how elon musk s plans for twitter could threaten free speech. suzanne, good morning to you, thank you for being with us. hi, good morning. suzanne, elon musk s whole point it is tickled for twitter, at least his whole stated point has been about free speech, has been about how social media and corporate america stifle free speech. he wants to bring free speech to twitter, he calls it a digital town square. you are saying that in fact, the opposite might be achieved, why? free speech is not the tower of babel, it is not an environment where everyone just sounds off at will and no one is listening to each other and it is a cacophony. free speech is a
he just said over and over again, this is wrong. we could feel it all deepening, that impact, that idea that all of this stuff that is going on in our virtual lives, in our political sphere is all going to touch down in real violence here. jake, it s playing out across the country, this is a stark example of what we are seeing. thank you my friend, i appreciate it. stay on the story for us, nbc s jake ward is live in san francisco. meanwhile, following a katic months long public saga, elon musk now owns or controls twitter. multiple twitter executives, including the ceo, have now left the country. the self styled free speech absolutist will open up the platform to misinformation and harassment, the kind that the social media giant has been trying to rein in. in a post entitled deer twitter advertisers, which is posted on thursday, musk wrote quote, twitter obviously cannot become a free for all hell-scape or
elon musk s had that in the name of upholding free speech he will dial back safeguards on the platform that are there to protect against disinformation. that would be a mistake, not just because disinformation has fueled a crisis of faith in democracy and impeded pandemic response at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. this information, the largely protected it can also imperil free speech itself. now, you just made that point but the distinction that a lot of people miss and i think sometimes elon musk himself misses is that the first amendment protects against government censorship. it does not mean that private enterprise like twitter cannot moderate, cannot have guardrails as you say, cannot have safeguards. that is right. the first amendment safeguards against government coming into ban and punish our speech, particularly on ideological grounds. i think it s a very good thing, we can see how that power could