“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,” the First Amendment states. But if it plays the angles just right, today’s Democratic Congress figures it can play a bank shot to get someone else to abridge the freedom of speech.
That’s what Thursday’s tech hearings were all about.
“Misinformation and hate speech” were the buzzwords Democrats used to describe facts and opinions Democrats do not like. For good measure, some threw in the old favor of censors, “shouting fire in a crowded theater.”
It’s very simple: Democrats hope to use the tech giants to censor the other side. Facebook, Twitter, and Google have had varying reactions to these entreaties in recent months and years. Democrats will continue to make it clear that Democrats have the power to subsidize, tax, regulate, and protect the giants, so they expect these companies to crack down on bad speech.
The release announcing the hearing attacked Facebook, Twitter, and Google for “their role in the dissemination and amplification of misinformation and extremist content.”
“Each of you has failed to protect your users from” various bad content, Democrats said, citing malefactors such as “Holocaust deniers, terrorists, or worse.” It’s not just Holocaust deniers and terrorists Democrats want to silence. It’s also pro-lifers, conservative commentators, and investigative reporters who have unearthed unflattering news about President Joe Biden.
It really doesn’t take guesswork to see what Democrats expect and hope the platforms will disallow. It was under pressure from Democrats that Facebook and Twitter banned former President Donald Trump, and then Amazon shut down the competitor Parler. Which Republican politician will be next?
Twitter and Facebook just before the election both cut off access to a New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s corrupt influence peddling, corruption which Joe Biden said was perfectly fine. The Democrats obviously want more of this.
Alongside the Democrats telling Facebook and Twitter to censor more conservatives is a liberal media that doesn’t like readers getting around their gatekeeping efforts. New York Times columnists and CNN reporters all spend their days railing about “misinformation” on Facebook when what they mean is that people are listening to Ben Shapiro.
We know that the abortion lobby considers all pro-life views to be illegitimate. If you point out that abortion is violence, abortion industry leaders will denounce it as incitement — which, of course, is not protected speech. Facebook has, at times, turned to the abortion lobby to fact-check pro-life claims, which, shockingly, ended up with undeserved flags.
Thankfully, the CEOs have, at times, resisted the censorship push. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey admitted that censoring the Hunter Biden story was a mistake. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg seems to be trying to fend off demands from Democrats and CNN that he censor more.
Yet Democrats see this liberalism as greed. They can’t imagine why the CEOs would hesitate to crack down on bad opinions other than “to drive their stock prices even higher.”
Democrats know they can’t outlaw bad stories like the Hunter Biden story, and they can’t outlaw pro-life opinions. They just hope that they can limit the public square to a handful of companies and then pressure those companies to do the censoring.
