Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said Thursday that he would create a new investigations subcommittee focused on tackling censorship of conservatives on Big Tech platforms if the GOP takes back the House in 2022.
After Republican Glenn Youngkin won Virginia’s governorship on Tuesday, the GOP is optimistic about the prospect of taking control of the House during next year’s midterm elections, putting top leaders like Jordan back in positions of power.
“We need to go after Big Tech, censorship of conservatives,” Jordan said on the Firebrand online show hosted by fellow Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.
“What Big Tech in collusion with Big Government is doing in this cancel culture world we live in is so wrong,” he said. “Bari Weiss called it the ‘digital thunderdome’ — you take on the woke mob, and they will put you in the thunderdome.”
Prominent examples of anti-Republican or conservative bias on Big Tech platforms recently include former President Donald Trump’s broad social media bans, the suppression of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden before the 2020 election, social media platform Parler being banned by Amazon, Apple, and Google earlier this year, and Google suppressing conservative news outlets in search results in the past few years.
Democrats and liberals challenge conservative allegations of online bias, citing studies finding that social media companies don’t discriminate against conservatives.
Under pressure to come up with a conservative approach to holding Big Tech companies accountable, House Republicans, led by Jordan, announced an agenda earlier this year to break them up in court and challenge censorship.
The House Judiciary Republican agenda released in July suggests proposals to make it easier to seek legal remedies against Big Tech companies’ content moderation decisions by allowing people to sue the companies for censorship and overhauling the companies’ technology liability protections.
The Republican agenda is meant to provide an alternative to the six bipartisan anti-Big Tech bills passed in June by the Judiciary Committee that many Republicans, including Jordan and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, oppose.
Republicans want to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the law that gives online platforms legal immunity for third-party content, to ensure content moderation decisions “are done in good faith, based on objectively reasonable criteria,” according to the Big Tech agenda document obtained by the Washington Examiner.
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The Republicans will introduce a proposal to require that large social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, make their content moderation decision and censorship actions publicly available and force them to pay a “massive fine” for failing to do so, the agenda said.
