Big Tech Increasingly Censoring Trump’s Allies And His Campaign. Time To Endorse Senator Hawley’s Internet Censorship Bill

Article publisher: 
VDare
Article date: 
12 May 2020
Article category: 
National News
Medium
Article Body: 

The Chinese Virus has given Big Tech a further excuse for a major crackdown on dissent. Consider the latest: Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have suppressed a documentary that claims the experts are wrong about the virus. Twitter muzzled black conservative commentator Candace Owens after she suggested people defy lockdown orders. Twitter has also banned several accounts that shared a parody of a Joe Biden ad.... This censorship will only worsen as we get closer to Election Day, so President Trump and his backers had better wake up....

 
But Twitter did not, of course, censor the World Health Organization “expert” who claimed people did not spread the virus to one another...
 
Even more ominously, MSM Leftists, and the professoriate, including law-school professors who should know better, don’t think this censorship has gone far enough. They openly prefer the Maoist model in Beijing....
 
“Content moderation” is a euphemism for editing and publishing. But this is not what those platforms present themselves as doing for the purposes of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That law protects them from liability for defamation and other claims to which the Main Stream Media are subject because social media are, we are to believe, “bulletin boards” where speech is unregulated.
 
Last, Columbia Law Professor Timothy Wu, who coined the term “net neutrality,” also wants more censorship...

The best right now: Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s proposed Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act that would subject Big Social Media to government oversight to ensure they comply with Section 230. If they violate it, they will be stripped of those protections. Thus, if Hawley’s bill passed, tech giants would do everything possible to maintain their immunity.

Whether the measure could pass a Democrat-controlled House is open to question. Apropos of the censored Biden satires, the Democrat vice presidential candidate wants to scrap 230 to impose more censorship and the Congressional party shamelessly wants to outlaw the Dissident Right.
 
But the GOP must at least move the bill through the Senate, get Trump behind it, and then use free speech as a campaign issue....