The GOP Knows That The Dem's Antitrust Efforts Have A Content Moderation Trojan Horse; Why Don't The Dems?

from the getting-played-like-a-fiddle dept

Last summer, I believe we were among the first to highlight that the various antitrust bills proposed by mainly Democratic elected officials in DC included an incredibly dangerous trojan horse that would aid Republicans in their "playing the victim" desire to force websites to host their disinformation and propaganda. The key issue is that many of the bills included a bar on self-preferencing a large company's own services against competitors. The supporters of these bills claimed it was to prevent, say, an Apple from blocking a competing mapping service while promoting Apple Maps, or Google from blocking a competing shopping service, while pushing Google's local search results.

But the language was so broad, and so poorly thought out, that it would create a massive headache for content moderation more broadly -- because the language could just as easily be used to say that, for example, Amazon couldn't kick Parler off it's service, or Google couldn't refuse to allow Gab's app in its app store. You would have thought that after raising this issue, the Democratic sponsors of these bills would fix the language. They have not. Bizarrely, they've continued to issue more bills in both the House and the Senate with similarly troubling language. Recently, TechFreedom called out this problematic language in two antitrust bills in the Senate that seem to have quite a lot of traction.

Whatever you think of the underlying rationale for these bills, it seems weird that these bills, introduced by Democrats, would satisfy the Republicans' desire to force online propaganda mills onto their platforms.

Every “deplatformed” plaintiff will, of course, frame its claims in broad terms, claiming that the unfair trade practice at issue isn’t the decision to ban them specifically, but rather a more general problem — a lack of clarity in how content is moderated, a systemic bias against conservatives, or some other allegation of inconsistent or arbitrary enforcement — and that these systemic flaws harm competition on the platform overall. This kind of argument would have broad application: it could be used against platforms that sell t-shirts and books, like Amazon, or against app platforms, like the Google, Apple and Amazon app stores, or against website hosts, like Amazon Web Services.

Indeed, as we've covered in the past, Gab did sue Google for being kicked out of the app store, and Parler did sue Amazon for being kicked of that company's cloud platform. These kinds of lawsuits would become standard practice -- and even if the big web services could eventually get such frivolous lawsuits dismissed, it would still be a tremendous waste of time and money, while letting grifters play the victim.

Incredibly, Republicans like Ted Cruz have made it clear this is why they support such bills. In fact, Cruz introduced an amendment to double down on this language and make sure that the bill would prohibit "discriminating on the basis of a political belief." Of course, Cruz knows full well this doesn't actually happen anywhere. The only platform that has ever discriminated based on a political belief is... Parler, whose then CEO once bragged to a reporter how he was banning "leftist trolls" from the platform.

Even more to the point, during the hearings about the bill and his amendment, Cruz flat out said that he was hoping to "unleash the trial lawyers" to sue Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and the like for moderating those who violate their policies. While it may sound odd that Cruz -- who as a politician has screamed about how evil trial lawyers are -- would be suddenly in favor of trial lawyers, the truth is that Cruz has no underlying principles on this or any other subject. He's long been called "the ultimate tort reform hypocrite" who supports trial lawyers when convenient, and then rails against them when politically convenient.

So no one should be surprised by Cruz's hypocrisy.

What they should be surprised by is the unwillingness of Democrats to fix their bills. A group of organizations (including our Copia Institute) signed onto another letter by TechFreedom that laid out some simple, common-sense changes that could be made to one of the bills -- the Open App Markets Act -- to fix this potential concern. And, yet, supporters of the bill continue to either ignore this or dismiss it -- even as Ted Cruz and his friends are eagerly rubbing their hands with glee.

This has been an ongoing problem with tech policy for a while now -- where politicians so narrowly focus on one issue that they don't realize how their "solutions" mess up some other policy goal. We get "privacy laws" that kill off competition. And now we have "competition" laws that make fighting disinformation harder.

It's almost as if these politicians don't want to solve actual issues, and just want to claim they did.

Filed Under: antitrust, app markets, competition, content moderation, democrats, discrimination, gop, open app markets, ted cruz

GOP Claim That Biden FCC Nom Gigi Sohn Wants To 'Censor Conservatives' Is AT&T & Rupert Murdoch Backed Gibberish

from the fluff-and-nonsense dept

We'd already noted how telecom and media giants are hard at work trying to scuttle the nomination of consumer advocate Gigi Sohn to the FCC. Sohn is not only a genuine reformer, she's broadly popular on both sides of the aisle in telecom and media circles. So companies like AT&T and News Corporation, which enjoyed no limit of ass kissing during the Trump era, are working overtime to come up with some feeble talking points loyal politicians can use to oppose her nomination. It's not going well.

About the best they could come up with was the entirely false claim that Sohn wants to "censor Conservatives." Anybody who actually knows Sohn knows the claim isn't true, and she's historically gone well out of her way to embrace policies that encourage diversity in media and speech, even when she doesn't agree with the speaker. Despite being a nonsense claim, it has been broadly peppered across the right wing echo chamber, including the usual columns at Breitbart, editorials by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, Tucker Carlson, and elsewhere.

The claim popped up again at last week's nomination hearing before a Senate Judiciary Committee courtesy of Senators Ted Cruz and Dan Sullivan:

"Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn faced off against Republican senators at a nomination hearing yesterday, disputing the senators' shaky claims that she would use a post at the FCC to censor conservatives. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) repeated arguments previously made by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which mostly boil down to complaints about Sohn's tweets criticizing Fox News and her criticism of Sinclair Broadcast Group."

As we've long noted, the claims that Conservatives are being "censored" in general (either on the internet or on traditional television) aren't remotely true. In fact Conservatives have not only built a massive right wing infotainment universe with a violent disdain for factual reality (OAN, NewsMax, Fox News, Breitbart, Facebook, YouTube, Blaze), they've mastered the art of trolling for outrage engagement, which generally involves saying inflammatory gibberish, then enjoying the added exposure from left-wing outrage retweets and ad-engagement obsessed clickbait coverage. Pretty much the exact opposite of "censorship."

What's usually deemed "censorship" is usually just fairly flimsy and short-lived accountability for spewing false or bigoted nonsense. And while the Trump GOP pretends to be mad at "big tech" for "censorship," what they're actually mad about is the fact that social media belatedly and inconsistently started reining in GOP race-baiting propaganda, a cornerstone of party power in the face of an unfavorable shift in demographics and a sagging electorate. The GOP has zero interest in genuine antitrust reform (see: forty straight years of U.S. history), but the pretense that they do provides handy cover for an agenda that's exclusively self-serving.

The new Trump GOP is currently a party of performative gibberish, entirely untethered from reality, propped up largely thanks to propaganda shoveled into the brains of low-information voters, tricked into rooting against their best self interests via a massive, well-funded coalition of traditional cable and online companies (again, quite the opposite of "censorship"). And outside of perhaps reining in media consolidation and encouraging more competition, there's not a whole lot the FCC can do about it from a policy perspective, given inevitable 1A challenges and a rightward-lurching Supreme Court. Even if Sohn wanted to "censor Conservatives" (which again, she doesn't) she'd find it an impossible task within the confines of the FCC and legal reality.

The great irony in the GOP/News Corp/AT&T alliance's effort to smear Sohn as somebody looking to "censor Conservatives?" Right wing news outlets like Newsmax and AT&T-funded OAN actually support her nomination because she's historically worked to encourage diversity in media viewpoints and healthy competition in media markets. Sohn highlighted as much at the hearing:

"I would say, look at my record. Look at the conservative cable channels that I worked with for years to get them carriage on cable systems when those systems would not carry them. I have long worked with organizations and companies with whom I vigorously disagree on their point of view—fervent Republicans, fervent supporters of the previous president—and I worked with them to get their views online. I believe that I have been characterized very unfairly as being anti-conservative speech. I think my record says otherwise."

It's kind of hard to smear somebody as a fan of "conservative censorship" when outlets like OAN and Newsmax, which routinely traffic in truly repugnant garbage, say she's always been even-handed when dealing with them. Check out this statement supporting Sohn by OAN President Charles Herring:

"She believes in the First Amendment and the advantages of a strong and open media for the benefit of our democracy. She is one of the most knowledgeable persons I know on FCC issues and has the common sense and desire to work with people on both sides of the aisle."

As usual with the broader Trump GOP, this isn't about policy, it's about money and power. AT&T and News Corporation don't want Sohn appointed because she'd not only break a 2-2 partisan gridlock in voting at the FCC, she actively supports holding telecom and media giants accountable for bad behavior. That's in pretty stark contrast to the last four years of the Trump FCC, which basically involved coddling entrenched telecom and media giants at every conceivable opportunity, even if that required a whole lot of lying and legally dubious behavior.

If you're a Trump-allied GOP lawmaker you can't just come out and say you're opposing Sohn's nomination because you're lodged up AT&T and Rupert Murdoch's ass and the only thing you care about is protecting their revenues so campaign contributions keep flowing. So instead you glom on to the Trump GOP's perpetual victimization complex to not only change the subject (away from the fact you're an enabler of anti-competitive monopolists and have been for decades), but distract and agitate the base with false outrage and victimization porn. Sohn can be approved to the post without GOP support, so in the end most of this is little more than a delay tactic and empty calorie performative gibberish, much like the lion's share of the modern Trump GOP policy platform.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, anti-conservative bias, fcc, gigi sohn, grandstanding, politics, ted cruz
Companies: newsmax, oan

How Do You Debate Section 230 When One Side Constantly Lies About It?

from the this-is-not-a-both-sides-issue dept

The Federalist Society this week released an interesting and well-produced video all about the Section 230 debate. Whatever you might think about the Federalist Society, the video is worth watching. The video does not take a position on 230 but basically presents it as if there are two equally competing visions of 230 -- one in which it's good and one in which it's a problem. And if you just watch the video, you might think that this is because there are just disagreements about how 230 works and the impact it has on speech online. But that's only because one side of the debate is completely making shit up and the other is being accurate.

In this case, the person making up shit about 230 is... Senator Ted Cruz. Cruz has been lying about Section 230 for years. Indeed, I think we can trace most of the blatant falsehoods about 230 that seem to come from Republicans to Ted Cruz. It seems like 3 years ago, Cruz decided that it would be a fun culture war thing to "attack big tech" and lying about 230 seemed like the easiest way to do so. Other politicians (most notably Josh Hawley) have since followed him down that path, but it's Cruz who seems to be patient zero of the GOP's "making shit up about 230." Of course, what's perhaps most ironic is that everything that Cruz has been falsely saying about 230 conflicts directly with the other stuff he made up about net neutrality back when that fight was on.

Back in 2014, when the FCC finally put in place reasonable net neutrality rules, Cruz flipped out and insisted that simple rules against throttling or blocking access to websites was the government taking over the internet. Now, with 230, he insists (falsely) that 230 had some built in neutrality requirement, and he's mad that it's no longer there. He's wrong on... all of this.

Let's dig in:

Who in their right mind would want all of political discourse in America governed by a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires? With unfettered power to silence anyone. That's what we have now and I think it threatens our elections, it threatens our democracy, and it threatens free speech in a way we've never seen before in our democracy.

Oh come on. First of all, pre-internet, the vast majority of people had no outlet for them to speak to the vast majority of other Americans (or people around the globe). They could only speak to people around them, and that was an extremely limited audience. Today, the internet has enabled people to speak to tons of people across a wide variety of platforms or -- even better, to set up your own website and communicate to whatever audience you can attract. The idea that a few popular sites have "unfettered power to silence anyone" is ridiculous. First of all, they can't silence people. They can only refuse them service on their platforms. And the internet is much bigger than those platforms.

Second, they have strong incentives not to just randomly silence people and really are not doing so. While they sometimes make mistakes, it's not like they're suddenly deciding that idiots like Ted Cruz can't lie to the American public and create bogus culture wars. Hell, this video is... hosted on YouTube. Are there cases where these sites have over moderated content that they probably should not have? Sure, absolutely. But there remain many other options out there, and the idea that a few sites having moderation policies Ted Cruz doesn't like is in no way a "threat to free speech." And, it most certainly is not a historic threat the way Cruz presents it.

Again, compare this to what we had before. Before people had no significant tools to get their speech out there. If you wanted to speak to a wide audience, you were immediately limited by a bunch of giant gatekeepers who suppressed way more speech than any internet platform ever has. You needed to get a newspaper publisher, book publisher, or TV or radio station to agree to allow you to speak, and they rejected nearly all such efforts. They only allowed through a tiny fraction of those who wished to be published or put on the air.

The change today is massive. But if we're talking about the power of big companies to silence speech, we're in a fundamentally different world today where the primary purpose of many of these companies is enabling the vast majority of people to be able to speak to wider audiences. The old systems were focused on just allowing through a tiny minority of people to speak. We're currently in amazing times for freedom of speech, and the fact that a few platforms don't want assholes and disinformation merchants is not an attack on free speech.

Later Cruz does this misleading garbage thing where he says that the big tech companies have refused to tell him how many Republican candidates for office have had their content "blocked, shadowbanned, or restricted." He insists that there is a clear number "an integer" that these companies know and refuse to tell him and "that unchecked power is dangerous."

Except that entire statement is garbage. First of all, "shadowbanning" is not a defined thing, and most companies don't do anything that can be reasonably defined as "shadowbanning" or "throttling." But all of these platforms do have algorithms that suggest content to users, and they may rank certain content higher than others, because the algorithms believe users are more likely to want to see some content, and less likely to see other content. Is having the algorithm decide that one politician's content is less interesting than another's... is that "shadowbanning"? Is that "throttling"? Who the fuck knows? That's why Cruz's question is so disingenuous. He's asking an unanswerable question, and then pretending that when companies don't answer a question that can't be answered that they're dodging the issue.

And, no, that power is not "unchecked." Remember when Ted Cruz was a Republican who pretended to believe in the market? If these companies were really terrible at all of this, then that's an opportunity for alternatives to spring up. Or it's a reason for users to stop using the platforms. Or for advertisers to go elsewhere. There are all sorts of market incentives for these companies to be better. Cruz is just making shit up again.

Right now, Section 230 is part of how Congress continues to protect these monopolies that are abusing their power and trying to silence you.

Oh come on. Section 230 protects everyone online. It's got nothing to do with "monopolies" (and just the fact he is referring to multiple companies as monopolies should make you question if he knows what the word monopoly means). And, no, they're not trying to "silence you." They're trying to balance a ton of competing interests, including stopping spam, harassment, abuse, and disinformation that is creating larger societal problems that cynical opportunist politicians like Ted Cruz want to brush under the rug or deny.

The question of what to do about big tech censorship is a difficult question. I will readily concede that as a policy matter, that is not easy to solve. Nobody in their right mind wants to see a federal government speech police.

And here he is trying to have it both ways, because everything else he says is demanding exactly that. Having the federal government force websites to host some speech while removing some other speech. But Cruz wants to have it both ways. Because he's lying.

But it's no longer the case that tech companies are these tiny little startups. It's no longer the case that they're a couple of kids starting something in their college dorm room.

Uh, there are still tons of startups, including started by kids in their dorm rooms that are protected by 230.

So it then becomes a thorny problem. How do you solve this blatant censorship and bias coming from Silicon Valley. First, which we're talking about right now, is repealing or modifying Section 230. Eliminating the special immunity from liability that big tech gets that was based on the belief that they would be neutral public forum. They've abandoned that promise. They've decided that they're not neutral. They're partisan, they will silence your views if they disagree with them.

Everything he says here is hogwash. First, the small lie: Section 230 is not about "big tech." It protects small sites and users as well. It protects Ted Cruz when he retweets something or when he forwards an email.

Then the big lie: the idea that 230 was premised on "neutrality." While the video later does show Chris Cox -- who wrote Section 230 -- debunking this myth, it's much later in the video and people watching it might not even realize that he's basically calling out Cruz as a blatant liar. Section 230 was never based on the idea of any website being "a neutral public forum." As Cox says later, how would that even make any sense? No one would expect, say, the Republican National Committee to have to host speech promoting Democrats.

The entire point of Section 230 was to allow websites to moderate how they saw fit for the community they wanted to have on their website. It's why we see so many different websites with so many different approaches. Because no one wants or needs a one-size-fits-all approach. So, if websites wanted to be biased, that's exactly what 230 was designed to support. So no site "broke" any promise, because no promise was made.

And finally, it's bullshit that any of the big companies are "partisan" in their moderation. They're not banning people for their political views. They're banning them when they're spewing disinformation or harassment in a way that makes it difficult for others using the site as well. The only site I've seen admit to being "partisan" was Parler, whose former CEO bragged to reporters about banning "leftists." I didn't see Cruz complain about that.

I think there should be strong incentive in federal law for the big companies to go back to being neutral public fora. They know how to do that. They did that for years. Because if they silence anyone who disagrees with the leftwing orthodoxy we'll only hear one view.

Oh come on. Again, they were never "neutral public fora." They have always had content moderation policies, removing spam and harassment -- and things they were legally required to remove, such as copyright infringement and child sexual abuse material.

And, again, remember that the one regulation we did have about making a part of the internet "neutral" resulted in Cruz himself screaming about how it was "Obamacare for the internet" and "the government takeover of the internet." Ted Cruz is a lying fucking hypocrite.

Oh, and there is no site out there that is silencing "anyone who disagrees with leftwing orthodoxy." Again, Ted Cruz -- who clearly disagrees with leftwing orthodoxy -- is still on all these platforms. This video is hosted by YouTube. Cruz is just culture warrioring, by lying to you.

That's the world of big tech, but it's even worse because it's 3 or 4 billionaires in Silicon Valley deciding what you get to hear, what you get to say, what you get to know. That is an incredible danger to our Constitution, to our Bill of Rights, and to our democracy.

Again, no. The Bill of Rights and the Constitution are mostly about limiting what Congress can do. Private companies exercising editorial discretion on their platforms is actually protected by the Bill of Rights.

I'm not sure there was a single thing in this entire video that came out of Ted Cruz's mouth that was anywhere near truth. It was all cynical bullshit that was not only ridiculous and wrong, but was designed to mislead people. I know the Federalist Society wants to present "both sides" of this issue, but how do you do that when the people you choose have no compunction about just flat out lying?

Filed Under: content moderation, lies, neutrality, section 230, ted cruz

Sens. Cruz, Hawley & Lee Show How To Take A Good Bill Idea And Make It Blatantly Unconstitutional

from the seriously-guys? dept

Senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Mike Lee, all hold themselves out to be "constitutional" lawyers. All graduated from law schools and went on to clerk for Supreme Court Justices (Cruz clerked for Rehnquist, Hawley for Roberts, and Lee for Alito -- though before he moved to the Supreme Court). And yet, all three have shown that their support for the Constitution they swore to uphold and protect is a little wishy washy when they can build a culture war around it and get some silly press attention. The latest move is their new bill to strip Major League Baseball's antitrust exemption.

Now, I've explained this before, but let me be explicit about it here, because it's the part that people keep getting tripped up on: I think this is a good idea. It's silly that Major League Baseball has an antitrust exemption and it should be gotten rid of. There's no need for it and it's bad policy that it exists. And if Senators Cruz, Hawley and Lee had simply introduced such a bill, I might even cheer it on.

But... that's not what they did. They announced it in a manner that makes it blatantly unconstitutional, because they flat out admit that they're doing it to punish MLB for MLB's political expression (namely moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta to protest Georgia's new voting law). And the Senators don't even try to hide this or come up with some Potemkin-style façade. They just out and out admit that they're doing this for unconstitutional reasons:

Following Major League Baseball’s (MLB) decision to relocate the All-Star game from the state of Georgia, U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) will hold a press conference today outlining their legislation to end MLB’s special immunity from antitrust laws.

Here's the thing that many people are missing: you can do constitutional things for unconstitutional reasons, and it makes the things you do... unconstitutional. In this case, Cruz, Lee, and Hawley are actually making it more difficult to remove MLB's antitrust exemption, because they've just handed MLB an easy response should this bill go anywhere. They can run to court and say that this was clearly vindictive behavior by Congress in response to protected 1st Amendment speech.

So even if you support removing MLB's antitrust exemption, you should be against this. Because this action, in this way, simply guarantees that if it got traction, it would get tied up in court for years solely due to the statements of Hawley, Cruz, and Lee.

It's quite likely that none of the three actually care, of course. They're all just grandstanding for an ignorant base who wants these Senators to embrace "cancelling" Major League Baseball for daring to... care about voting rights. And, in doing so, these three Senators show (yet again) that they're not interested in actually doing what's right, or what's constitutional. They're only interested in frothing up some grist for an ignorant base who revels in the politics of petty grievances.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, antitrust, exemption, free speech, josh hawley, mike lee, retaliation, ted cruz, voting rights
Companies: mlb

Dear Section 230 Critics: When Senators Hawley And Cruz Are Your Biggest Allies, It's Time To Rethink

from the strangest-bedfellows dept

Last week Senators Hawley and Cruz used their platform and power as United States Senators to deliberately spread disinformation they knew or should have known to be false in order to undermine public confidence in the 2020 Presidential Election results. Their actions gave oxygen to a lawless and violent insurrection that nearly overran—literally and physically—our democratic government.

They should have known better and there is every reason to believe they did know better. There is every reason to believe that they intended their actions to further their craven attempt to solidify their own desired political power, even though it came at the expense of our Constitutional order and democratic norms and likely *because* it came at the expense of our Constitutional order and democratic norms, which would otherwise have stood against their ambition. They are, after all, highly educated people, bearing credentials from some of our most esteemed academic institutions. It is impossible to believe they did not know what they were doing.

Just as it is impossible to believe they did not know what they were doing when they railed against Section 230. At first glance it may seem like an irrelevant quibble to take issue with their position on Internet policy when viewed in comparison to the actual, violent insurrection they also invited. But it is indeed worth the attention, for the same reasons that their other anti-democratic behavior is so troubling. Because one of the reasons we have rights of free expression in America, and the Constitution to guarantee them, is because free expression is so necessary as a check against tyranny. And for those like Hawley and Cruz who are rooting for the tyranny, getting rid of those speech protections is a necessary first step to advancing that anti-democratic end.

Which is what gutting Section 230 would do. While the First Amendment would, of course, in theory still be there to protect speech, in practice those rights would become illusory. When it comes to online expression, Section 230 is what makes those speech rights the First Amendment protects real and meaningful. And that's exactly what Hawley and Cruz want to prevent.

They want to prevent it because they can see how Section 230 stands in their way. They can see how platforms exercising their First Amendment rights to choose which user speech to facilitate could lead to those platforms choosing not to facilitate their poisonous propaganda, and they understand how stripping platforms of their Section 230 immunity effectively takes away platforms' ability to make that choice by making it too legally precarious to try.

They also can see how stripping platforms of their statutory immunity could force platforms to suppress user speech that challenges them. Section 230 allows platforms to have a free hand in enabling user speech because it means they don't have to fear enduring an expensive legal challenge over it. Without the statute's currently unequivocal protection, however, they won't be able to accommodate it so willingly. They will be forced to say no to plenty, including plenty of socially valuable, Constitutionally-protected speech against government officials like Hawley and Cruz, lest these platforms make themselves vulnerable to expensive litigation over it—which, even if unmeritorious, would do nothing but drain their resources. Every change to Section 230 that Hawley and Cruz have demanded would erode this critical protection platforms depend on to enable all this user expression and lead them to second guess whether they could continue to. And it would thus leave Hawley, Cruz, and their corrupt compatriots free to continue their nefarious efforts to consolidate their control over the nation without much fear of complaint.

The problem is, though, so would all the changes to Section 230 also being championed by Democrats. Campaigning against Section 230 has not been the exclusive domain of Republicans. Plenty of Democrats have joined them, from Senator Blumenthal (D-CT), to Rep. Eshoo (D-CA) and Rep. Malinowski (D-NJ), to even Senator Schatz (D-HI). And, of course, perhaps the most prominent Democrat of them all: President-Elect Joe Biden. Their reasons for agitating against Section 230 may be different than those cited by Republicans, and their proposed changes may vary in specifics as well, but, whether they realize it or not, the effect of all these changes would be the same as what Hawley and Cruz have advocated for: the erosion of First Amendment protections online. Which will only grease the skids for the Hawleys and Cruzes of the world as much as all the changes they themselves have been calling for.

Every policymaker appalled by what has just transpired and eager to preserve our system of self-government must take heed. Our inherently fragile democracy cannot survive without free speech, and no policymaker who wishes to ensure its survival can afford to do anything to undermine it. But when it turns out, as it does now, that the policy demanded by democracy's saviors is the same exact policy sought by its enemies, those who wish to save it need to think again about what they really ought to be asking for.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, free speech, josh hawley, open internet, reform, repeal, section 230, ted cruz

Politics Is Not A Game

from the what-can-you-say dept

I spent yesterday quite numb watching the events unfolding in Washington DC, in which an angry mob of insurrectionists -- egged on by the President of the United States, a few key Senators, and certain news media personalities -- literally stormed the US Capitol to try to block the formality of Presidential vote counting or, worse, to overthrow the government. I couldn't write anything. I couldn't take care of other work happening. I was witnessing the kind of history I never thought I would witness. I was angry. I was scared. I was frustrated. But most of all I was disappointed. What can you say after a day like yesterday? Most of what I could say would be covered by everyone else. Indeed, this morning I got to my desk to find that our own Tim Geigner had written the kind of post I originally thought I would write.

So this post will be a little different. It is clear by now that there is no redeeming our President even in his last days in office. He has shown that everything is about him. He literally said "we love you!" to the mob storming the Capitol. It has long been obvious that the only thing he cares about is himself -- and that he views everything through the lens of "does this person like me or not." He does not care about America. He does not care about its people. He cares about people who like him, and those storming the Capitol did so in his name, and he obviously loved it. Because, as stupid and illegal as what they did was, they were showing that they would do stupid and illegal things for him.

However, the real anger needs to be directed as his enablers. His many, many enablers. And it has become obvious that, for many of them, this is a game. This is not about governing. This is not about representing people's interests. This is about red team v. blue team, and doing whatever it takes to win. This is not new, of course. This has been the nature of politics going back centuries. But, in the US, there were at least some limits. Some small bit of idealism, often hidden away in the back corner of the attic, highlighted by the regular peaceful transfer of power even among political enemies, that said: in the end, the greater good is more important than just winning the game.

But, for too many, that has gone away. And winning the game is all that matters -- even if it destroys the entire nation. And for all the complaints I have about the Democratic Party, this is entirely on the Republican Party and its leadership. As I said on Twitter the other day, I actually prefer a divided government that can work on compromise. Despite regular accusations from people that I am whatever they are not, I've never been a member of either party, and I have always tried to support policies that I think will be most effective -- not based on ideology, but on understanding the policy and its likely impact. That's the way governing should work.

But the events of the last few years has shown that for too many in the Republican Party it is 100% about winning. It's not even based on ideology -- as the last four years has shown that their ideology will shift on a dime if they think it will help them win. The party of free trade flipped to be the party of trade wars. The party of small government became a huge supporter of government interference in business operations. Because it was not about ideology, it was about the game. About helping the red team win.

Much of the anger at this approach to "governing" needs to be directed at Mitch McConnell, who made it clear 12 years ago that his single driving ethos was making sure his team won and the other team lost -- and then made all sorts of unprecedented moves to make that happen. But, at least when on the brink, he recognized the pointlessness of continuing to push the myth that Trump actually won when it mattered yesterday. His last minute attempts to stuff that genie back in the bottle yesterday are no excuse, but the true scorn must be reserved for those who couldn't even do that much: Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. Respected conservative commentator George Will got this part right in his Washington Post column today. Hawley and Cruz should forever be branded as seditionists after egging on and encouraging the events of yesterday, even as they came out late in the day with weak "we didn't mean violence!" statements:

Trump lit the fuse for the riot in the weeks before the election, with his successful effort to delegitimize the election in the eyes of his supporters. But Wednesday’s explosion required the help of Hawley (R-Mo.) and Cruz (R-Tex.).

Hawley announced his intention to object to the certification of some states’ electoral votes, for no better reason than that there has been an avalanche of “allegations” of election irregularities, allegations fomented by the loser of the election. By doing so, Hawley turned what should have been a perfunctory episode in our civic liturgy of post-election civility into a synthetic drama. He turned this moment into the focus of the hitherto unfocused fury that Trump had been stoking for many weeks.

And Cruz, by organizing support for Hawley among other Republican senators and senators-elect gave Hawley’s grotesque self-promotion an ersatz cloak of larger purpose. Shortly before the mob breached the Senate chamber, Cruz stood on the Senate floor. With his characteristic unctuousness, he regretted the existence of what he and kindred spirits have not only done nothing to refute but have themselves nurtured — a pandemic of suspicions that the election was “rigged.”

“I want to take a moment to speak to my Democratic colleagues,” said Cruz. “I understand your guy is winning right now.” Read those weasely words again. He was not speaking to his “colleagues.” He was speaking to the kind people who were at that instant assaulting the Capitol. He was nurturing the very delusions that soon would cause louts to be roaming the Senate chamber — the fantasy that Joe Biden has not won the election but is only winning “right now.”

Here's the important point: we know Trump doesn't understand or care about any of this. That's not true of Hawley or Cruz. They know. They know that Trump is off his rocker. But both of them see this as a game. It's a game they both want to win. They're both famous for their levels of naked greed and ambition to get to the top spot. And both have made the political calculus that the way to win is to egg on a mob of insurrectionists in the hopes that the same mob will support them in the future.

They both know that they are selling out America, harming the public, spreading disinformation, and helping to lead on a mob of insurrectionists. Because they think it's a game and they need to win.

And that's exactly why neither of them should be anywhere near positions of power ever again.

Both were given the biggest tests of their lives yesterday: do you make the right choice? Stand up for the Constitution? Stand up for that buried, hidden, dusty, abandoned-in-the-back-of-the-attic ideal of what America is supposed to be? Or do you take the ambitious but cowardly position of egging on the mob in the hopes that one day they will be your mob? I've criticized both Senators many times over the years because their actions and statements have long predicted this moment.

And, yet... in the back of my head, I still had that slight tinge of optimism that maybe, just maybe, one or both of them might look at what they had wrought and recognize that it's not just a game and that people's lives are at stake, and the very nature of our country is at stake, and come back from the brink and admit that perhaps they had gone too far.

This is what real leadership is about. Real leadership is about making the hard choices. The choices that are right in the face of deluded people telling you to go the other way. Real leadership is about recognizing when you are wrong, admitting it, and understanding why you made that mistake.

But neither Hawley nor Cruz did that. Both continued to attack. Cruz, bizarrely, accused Beto O'Rourke (his vanquished Senate opponent from a few years ago) of pushing for division. That is not reality. Hawley, after giving a now-famous raised fist gesture to the insurrectionist mob, stayed silent for hours before having his press team put out a weak tea statement about how he doesn't support violence. And, as Nilay Patel correctly noted, Hawley issued a much more forceful condemnation of... infinite scrolling apps than he did of the insurrectionist mob that he helped to encourage.

And then, after the invaders were removed from the Capitol, after so much damage had been done, they both had another chance. A chance to admit that America is more than a game to them. They had a chance to show that politics is not just about winning and losing, but about governing and leading and doing the right thing. And they both failed again. They both continued to object to the results of the election that they both absolutely know are legitimate.

And, yes, there remained an astounding number of idiot House Members who also objected -- often spewing debunked conspiracy theories and lies about election fraud that did not happen, and demanding investigations that already happened and proved the conspiracy theories were false -- and they all deserve criticism as well (including the GOP House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy). But the Senate is supposed to be different and better than that. And beyond that, Hawley and Cruz both know better. Neither are stupid. Both have long and well documented careers. Both attended Ivy League universities. Both clerked at the Supreme Court.

They know.

And they chose to treat America like a game.

No one should ever let them forget what they did.

Filed Under: capitol building, donald trump, enablers, game, governing, insurrection, josh hawley, leadership, mitch mcconnell, mobs, politics, ted cruz, winning

Day After Senator Lindsey Graham Is Credibly Accused Of Trying To Undermine The Election, He Hosts Hearing Attacking Social Media For Undermining Election

from the this-is-all-so-dumb dept

The timing on this is quite incredible. On Monday, Georgia's (Republican) Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, spoke out, saying that Senator Lindsey Graham had called him and implied that Raffensperger should look to throw out ballots that were legally cast in the state. On Tuesday morning, in trying to defend his efforts to undermine the election, Graham tried to shake off his calls with Raffensperger as no big deal, saying that he also spoke to Arizona and Nevada election officials. This does not make things better. Indeed, it actually seems to make things worse (and that's even after Arizona's Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs, claimed that Graham's claims were "false" and she never spoke to him.

All of this certainly seems like cause for concern about election interference and tampering. Indeed, it's the kind of thing a good government would at least investigate. And, in a stroke of good timing, the Senate Judiciary Committee was all set up on Wednesday to host a hearing about the 2020 Election and "suppression." Except... this hearing was organized and chaired by the very same Senator Lindsey Graham, and was yet another dog and pony show of internet CEOs having to defend specific content moderation choices.

Now a sane person who loosely follows the news might be saying "wait, didn't we just do that last month?" And you'd be right. Just a few weeks ago, there was an almost identical hearing. Both hearings had Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (the earlier hearing also had Google's Sundar Pichai). Both hearings featured a bunch of grandstanding and often clueless Senators demanding to know specific answers to why the websites did or did not moderate specific pieces of content.

But this time it was the Senate Judiciary Committee, as compared to the Senate Commerce Committee last time. There were a few overlapping guests -- including Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Marsha Blackburn. This one also included Senator Josh Hawley who grandstands with the best of them over this issue. Cruz and Lee basically did a warmed over, half-baked rehash of their performances from a few weeks ago. Hawley's performance was particularly stupid. He claimed to have heard from a "whistleblower" inside Facebook and posted two grainy screenshots of internal Facebook tools. One was its "Tasks" tool, which is a general company-wide task manager tool, which Hawley used to imply that Facebook, Twitter and Google are some how colluding to figure out which users, hashtags, and content they're going to suppress.

This is not how any of this works. Hawley demanded that Zuckerberg turn over every mention of Google or Twitter in their Tasks tool, and Zuck quite reasonably pointed out that he couldn't commit to that without knowing what sort of sensitive information might be involved. This is basically the equivalent of Hawley asking for every email that mentions Twitter or Google. It's an insane and intrusive request, though he threatened to subpoena the company if Zuckerberg wouldn't comply. Hawley then demanded to know if any Facebook employees ever communicate with Twitter or Google.

Zuckerberg, again, quite reasonably, pointed out that he's sure that people who work in trust and safety at some point or another know of people in similar roles at other companies and he's sure at some point or another some of them communicate with each other, but that's quite different than plotting over what content to block as Hawley kept insisting. Hawley then trotted out another screenshot of some other internal tool that Zuckerberg says he didn't recognize and thus couldn't answer any questions about -- which Hawley again pretended to be some damning evasiveness from the CEO. What it actually suggested is that this is not a very important tool, and Hawley is clearly overstating what it's used for.

Oh, and Hawley, ridiculously, insisted on calling the trust and safety teams at these companies "censorship teams," and implying that they deliberately try to silence ideological content (they do not). Of course, what's truly crazy is that many of the half-dozen or so different Section 230 reform bills that Hawley has introduced in the Senate would actually require more content takedowns than we have today. But you can't be a demagoguing populist without demagoguing while the cameras are on, and Hawley played his part.

If you'd like to read my play-by-play response to the entire hearing as it happened, I have a very long Twitter thread:

Or if you're truly a glutton for punishment, you can watch the entire 4 hours and 43 minutes of the hearing but I do not recommend that for your own sanity:

Like other hearings involving the internet, this hearing was big on rhetoric, ignorance on the part of the senators and no clear urgent need for such a hearing right now. For the most part, you had Republican senators mad about choices to moderate certain content (or to make decisions too quickly that later turned out to be mistaken), while Democratic senators were mad about choices not to moderate other content (or to make decisions too slowly). In other words, they see this debate as a sort of tug o' war, with the companies as the rope, and their main hope is to influence content moderation to work the way they want it to work, if they could wave a magic wand and just enable the content that they and their supporters want.

We should see this entire thing as an affront to the 1st Amendment. Demanding changes (in either direction) to the content moderation practices of private websites is a massive 1st Amendment issue. Imagine if Democratic senators called in Fox News execs to complain about story choices? Or Republicans did the same with the NY Times. 1st Amendment and free press people would be reasonably up in arms over this gross abuse of power over something that the Constitution deliberately and clearly says Congress has no authority over.

So why do we let them do this to social media companies?

Much of the hearing was little more than moral panic claim after moral panic claim, highlighting the nature and problems of society itself -- and then pinning the blame on social media. It's the same moral panic we've seen play out over and over again for centuries. Some new medium comes about, and people use it. Some people use it for things that upset other people, and rather than look at the underlying causes, it's easier to blame the messenger.

It's as disappointing as it is predictable.

And chances are it's only going to continue. Towards the end of the hearing Senator Thom Tillis (and Senator Chris Coons) suggested that both Zuckerberg and Dorsey should commit to returning again next month. And Senator Richard Blumenthal even laughed mirthfully in closing out the hearing by saying he fully expected there to be many, many more hearings with these execs.

It's all for show. The senators want to be seen to be doing something and picking on these platforms is a welcome distraction from actual problems in society -- including a president who refuses to concede in the election he lost, the quarter of a million (and climbing) dead people from a botched COVID response (and the lack of any real effort to deal with COVID as it sweeps across the country again), and so many other things. Rather than facing actual problems facing society, Senator Lindsey Graham and his colleagues have decided that it's best to play "look! squirrel!" and insist that the biggest problem of today is that Twitter and Facebook want to fact check the president when he spews nonsense and dangerous conspiracy theories.

Filed Under: congress, content moderation, jack dorsey, josh hawley, lindsey graham, mark zuckerberg, marsha blackburn, section 230, senate judiciary committee, ted cruz
Companies: facebook, twitter

The Senate Snowflake Grievance Committee Quizzes Tech CEOs On Tweets & Employee Viewpoints

from the this-is-not-how-any-of-this-works dept

On Wednesday morning the Senate Commerce Committee held a nearly four hour long hearing ostensibly about Section 230 with three internet CEOs: Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Sundar Pichai from Google, and Jack Dorsey from Twitter. The hearing went about as expected: meaning it was mostly ridiculous nonsense. You had multiple Republican Senators demanding that these CEOs explain why they had taken actions on certain content, with some silly "whataboutism" on other kinds of content where action wasn't taken. Then you had multiple Democratic Senators demanding these CEOs explain why they hadn't taken faster action on pretty much the same content that Republicans had complained some action had been taken on.

The shorter summary was that Republicans were demanding that their own lies and propaganda should be left alone, while Democrats demanded that lies and propaganda should be removed faster. Both of these positions are an anathema to the 1st Amendment, and the people advocating for them on both sides should be embarrassed. While each platform has the right, under the 1st Amendment, to host or not host whatever speech they want, based on whatever policies they set, Congress cannot and should not, be in the position of either telling companies what content they need to host or what content they must take down. And yet, we saw examples of both during the hearing. On the Democratic side, Senators Markey and Baldwin, among a few others, pushed the companies to take down more content. This is extremely troubling on 1st Amendment grounds. On the Republican side, many, many Senators demanded that certain content should be unblocked -- in particular the NY Post's Twitter account.

And there were a few (very limited) good points from both sides of the aisle. Senator Brian Schatz noted that the entire hearing was being done in bad faith by Senate Republicans to try to bully the companies into not removing disinformation in the final week of the election. He noted that, while he had many questions for the three CEOs, he would not participate in this "sham" by asking questions during this particular hearing. Kudos to him. On the Republican side, Senator Jerry Moran noted that changes to Section 230 were the kinds of things that the three companies before the Committee could handle, but which would hamstring smaller competitors (to be fair, Jack Dorsey made this point in his opening testimony as well).

But I wanted to focus on some specific grandstanding by a few key Senators who made particularly ridiculous statements. And, I will point out upfront that these all came from Republicans. I'm not pointing that out because I'm "biased" against them, but because of the simple objective fact that it was these Republican Senators who made the most ridiculous statements of the day. The key theme between them was a ridiculous sense of grievance, and a false belief that the company's moderation practices unfairly targeted "conservatives." Except nearly all of them assumed that because more Republicans were moderated, that was proof of bias -- and not the idea that, perhaps, Republicans do more things that violate the policies of these companies. In the same manner that I'm picking on mostly Republican Senators here, that has more to do with their own actions, than any personal "bias."

What was most frightening, however, in the comments from these Senators is how at home they would have been in the days of Joseph McCarthy. Multiple Senators demanded to know about the personal ideological viewpoints of people who worked for these companies. Both Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg correctly pointed out that they do not ask their employees about their political leanings (Pichai stated that they hire from all over, implying that there was a diverse ideological pool within their workforce).

It is stunning and dangerous for Senators to be demanding to know the political leanings of employees at any particular company. Senators Mike Lee, Ron Johnson and Marsha Blackburn all asked questions along these lines. Lee, who historically has been aligned with libertarian viewpoints, completely misrepresented the content moderation policies of these companies and insisted that they disproportionately target conservatives. They do not. If conservatives are violating their policies more than others, then that's on those people violating the policies, and not on the policies themselves. Lee also fell into the ridiculous myth that Google's policies directly targeted conservatives in demonetizing The Federalist. As we've discussed multiple times, that's utter bullshit. We received identical treatment to The Federalist. So did Slate and Buzzfeed. Lee, ridiculously, argued that the companies saying -- accurately -- that they do not target moderation decisions based on ideology perhaps violated laws against "unfair or deceptive trade practices." Basically because Lee falsely believes these companies target conservative speech (because he's so deep in his own filter bubble he doesn't even know it hits others as well), that they're engaging in deceptive practices.

Lee demanded that each company list "left leaning" accounts that had received similar treatment, and the various CEOs promised to get back to him, but this was a nonsense argument.

However the most ridiculous part of Lee's grandstanding was his disingenuous framing of content moderation. He started asking about how these companies "censor" content. In the past, we've discussed how moderation and censorship differ, but Lee stretched the definition to insane levels:

I think the trend is clear, you almost always censor -- meaning.... uh... when I use the word censor here I mean block content, fact check or label content, or demonetize websites.

In what fucking world does Senator Lee live in that fact checking is censorship? This is utter nonsense. Indeed, when Sundar Pichai actually pushed back and said "we don't censor," Lee jumped in obnoxiously to say that "I used the word censor as a term of art there and I defined that word." That's not how it works. You can't redefine a term to mean the literal opposite of what it means "as a term of art" and then demand that everyone agrees that they "censored" when your own definition includes fact checking or responding to a statement with more speech.

Senator Ron Johnson's time was particularly egregious. He read the following tweet into the record.

It's a tweet from a "Mary T. Hagan" saying:

Sen Ron Johnson is my neighbor and strangled our dog, Buttons, right in front of my 4 yr old son and 3 yr old daughter. The police refuse to investigate. This is a complete lie but important to retweet and note that there are more of my lies to come.

Yes, he read that whole thing into the record, and then whined directly to Jack Dorsey that this should not have been left up, and that people might not go to the polls and vote for him if they read it. It's hard to know where to begin on this one. Especially since it came right after Johnson was mad about other moderation choices Twitter had made to takedown content. But the most incredible bit was that the obvious point of this tweet (which seemed to fly right over Johnson's head) is to make fun of Johnson's own willingness over the past few months to push Russian-originated propaganda talking points, and then whine that the media won't do anything about it and that law enforcement won't investigate.

So, a simple question for Johnson to answer would be: if he wants this tweet removed, how about removing his own efforts at pushing unverified propagandistic nonsense about Joe Biden?

But, really, this was par for the course for so much of the hearing. Senators (both Democrats and Republicans) showing a vast misunderstanding of how content moderation works, would call up a single example of a content moderation choice and demand an explanation -- often ignoring the explanations from Dorsey and Zuckerberg who would calmly explain what their policy was, why a certain piece of content did or did not violate that policy -- and then scream louder as if they had found some sort of "gotcha" moment.

But honestly, the most insane moment of the hearing most likely involved Senator Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee. Blackburn has a long history of saying the complete opposite argument depending on which way the wind blows at any particular time. For example, during the net neutrality fight she screamed about how it was an example of government interference with innovation and that if we had net neutrality it would destroy "Facebook, YouTube, Twitter" (literally those three companies). Yet a few years later, she supported a bill to regulate the internet in the form of PIPA, a pro-censorship copyright bill.

Then, four years ago, she insisted that internet services had an obligation to delete "fake news." Yet, in the hearing on Wednesday, she flipped out at the companies for trying to moderate any news at all.

And then she took it one step further, and demanded to know if a Google engineer who made fun of her was still employed at the company.

Blackburn (R-Tenn.) asked CEO Sundar Pichai whether Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer and artificial intelligence researcher, still has a job at Google.

“He has had very unkind things to say about me and I was just wondering if you all had still kept him working there,” Blackburn said during the hearing, where she and other GOP lawmakers accused tech companies of squelching free speech.

Pichai said he did not know Lemoine’s employment status.

Breitbart News reported in 2018 that Lemoine had criticized Blackburn’s legislative record in excerpts of internal company messages and said Google should not “acquiesce to the theatrical demands of a legislator.”

“I’m not big on negotiation with terrorists,” Lemoine said, according to Breitbart.

Having a sitting US Senator specifically call out an employee for criticizing her, and asking to know his employment status is fundamentally terrifying. It is, again, reminiscent of the McCarthy hearings, and having elected officials targeting people for their political viewpoints. If people were serious about calling out "cancel culture," they'd be screaming about how dangerous it is that Blackburn was saying something like this.

The end result of the hearing was a lot more nonsense grandstanding that demonstrated that too many Senators simply do not understand the nature of content moderation, and because they personally disagree with certain policies, or the implementation of certain policies, it means that the companies are somehow doing it wrong. But this is the very nature of content moderation. No single human being will agree with every decision. To immediately leap to the assumption of bad intent (or bad policies) because you disagree with a small sample set of decisions is intellectually lazy and dishonest.

Oh, and Ted Cruz also did some theatrical bullshit, that was mostly performative idiocy, but since he only did it to get a few social media snippets and headlines, we're not going to play that game, and just say simply that Senator Cruz came off like a total disingenuous jackass, who wanted to make the hearing about himself, rather than anything even remotely substantive.

Filed Under: content moderation, ed markey, grandstanding, jack dorsey, mark zuckerberg, marsha blackburn, mike lee, ron johnson, section 230, senate commerce committee, sundar pichai, ted cruz
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

Ted Cruz Once Insisted That Net Neutrality Was The Gov't Takeover Of The Internet; Now Demands That Twitter Host All Nonsense

from the that's-not-how-any-of-this-works dept

I guess Senator Ted Cruz was getting jealous of Senator Josh Hawley for monopolizing the "I'm a constitutional lawyer who doesn't understand the 1st Amendment when it comes to internet content moderation" space, and has jumped in as well. He has announced that he's going to issue a subpoena to get Jack Dorsey to come justify what he falsely claims is "election interference."

Let's be clear here. Like Senator Hawley yesterday, Senator Cruz is full of shit. And, like Hawley, Cruz is a constitutional lawyer who knows this is bullshit. Like Hawley, Cruz has now sent silly, laughable letters to Twitter and Facebook.

And, of course, it really was not that long ago when I remember this very same Ted Cruz screaming about the evils of the "government takeover of the internet." To him, the idea of net neutrality was "Obamacare for the internet" and he decried:

Washington politicians want the money, and they want more and more control over our speech.

That... describes Ted Cruz trying to punish a company for its editorial decisions. That same article has some other choice quotes that can now be thrown back at him:

[W]e must promote growth in the technological sector, a consistent bright spot for the U.S. economy. But we won’t realize more of that dynamic growth unless we keep the Internet free from the kind of unnecessary regulation that is strangling our health-care, energy and banking industries.

And yet, here he is threatening regulations to strangle growth of the technology sector.

In 2012, those who care about Internet freedom were shocked as bills such as the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts, which would regulate speech on the Internet under the guise of protecting property rights, started gaining popularity in Washington. Thankfully, online activists were quick to mobilize to protect their free-speech rights. But we must remain vigilant. Intellectual property must be defended, but any threat to quell speech on the Internet must be treated seriously and subsequently defeated.

The same activists who were "shocked" by SOPA and PIPA are the ones pointing out that Ted Cruz's attacks on Section 230 are an even bigger threat to quell speech on the internet and need to be treated seriously and defeated. It's just that Ted Cruz is the one now championing these efforts at censorship.

And for anyone trying to defend Ted Cruz right now, here's a basic question: how would you respond if a Democratic Senator stood up and said he or she was going to subpoena the CEOs of Fox News or Breitbart to discuss their "bias" in covering the election? People would be throwing an absolute and total shitfit about how unconstitutional that is. And yet, here we have a Republican Senator threatening a company for its own editorial decisions. Ted Cruz's grandstanding on this issue is, itself, a violation of the 1st Amendment. It is an attempt to punish a private company for its own 1st Amendment protected editorial discretion. And no one should let a grandstanding Cruz get away with this nonsense.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, content moderation, hypocrite, net neutrality, section 230, subpoena, ted cruz