Driven by stories about coronavirus-related user content removed by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, Sen. Ted Cruz wants to take on the social media giants again, saying the tech companies are using their influence to censor free speech.
The Texas Republican told the Washington Examiner Wednesday he planned to revisit his 2018 anti-censorship effort, which led to questions over whether Facebook was an online publisher or platform.
“I think there is widespread concern about big tech’s willingness to censor speech with which they disagree, and in this time of crisis, they’ve only gotten worse. YouTube, for example, is censoring discussions about this pandemic that disagree with the positions of the World Health Organization, an organization that has been roundly criticized as functioning as a mouthpiece for the propaganda talking points of the Communist government of China,” Cruz said.
“Now you have big tech, using its monopoly power to silence any views to the contrary. I think it is highly troubling. And I think there is growing concern and interest in acting to protect free speech,” he added.
When asked if the issue of whether the tech companies would have to face being called a publisher or platform, Cruz responded: “That’s certainly part of the discussion.”
In April 2018, Cruz grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg before the Senate Judiciary Committee, asking if he thought his company was a neutral public forum. Zuckerberg responded that Facebook was a “platform for all ideas.”
Around the same time, Facebook and Twitter drew increased scrutiny, as Republicans claimed the online behemoths were taking actions against conservative users. That led to both companies’ CEOs meeting with conservative activists the following year.
Cruz, however, argued in an op-ed on FoxNews.com that Zuckerberg’s response was significant.
“The problem is, this is not merely an academic distinction between words. Facebook’s answer to the question could affect millions of users, and attract (or prevent) a lot of attention from federal regulators,” he wrote. “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) states: ‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.’”
That means if a person has a blogging platform and a commenter posts a terrorist threat beneath a blog post, the blogger is not treated as the person making the threat.
“Without Section 230, many social media networks could be functionally unable to operate,” Cruz said.
To be protected by Section 230, the online tech giants should be “neutral public forums,” Cruz said.
Otherwise, the Texas Republican argues, they should be established as a “publisher or speaker” of user posts that can be published, emphasized, or removed by company administrators for any reason.
“But if Facebook is busy censoring legal, protected speech for political reasons, the company should be held accountable for the posts it lets through. And it should not enjoy any special congressional immunity from liability for its actions,” he wrote.
Cruz’s interpretation of Section 230, though, has been challenged by other legal experts.
David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told WJLA in 2018 the law was intended for another reason.
“Section 230 was passed for the specific purpose to encourage the companies to moderate content,” he said at the time. “At that point, they were trying to get them to filter out sexual content.”
