State Republicans aim for Big Tech
Bugged by conservative censorship, lawmakers seeking punishment
TALLAHASSEE A pair of Florida GOP lawmakers are attempting to follow through on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ push to punish Big Tech companies for purportedly censoring conservatives.
Sen. Joe Gruters and Rep. Randy Fine filed bills Tuesday that would prohibit the state and local governments from doing business with Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, starting July 1.
“What prompted me to draft this legislation was the lifetime ban of the President of the United States — the duly elected and non-removed President of the United States — forever, including after he was a private citizen, coupled with the sudden shutdown of competitors of companies by their fellow Big Tech companies,” Fine, R-Brevard County, said in an interview.
Fine was referring to the decision by Facebook and Twitter to bar former President Donald Trump from their platforms indefinitely after he incited a mob of his supporters to ransack the U.S. Capitol as Congress prepared to certify his loss in the Electoral College to President Joe Biden on Jan. 6. Amazon and Apple also refused to host or allow Parler, a conservative alternative to Twitter that refused to take down posts advocating violence against politicians, Jews and blacks, on their platforms. In its decision, Twitter said that after “close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
“Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly,” the company added. “It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open. However, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules entirely and cannot use Twitter to incite violence, among other things. We will continue to be transparent around our policies and their enforcement.”
For Fine and Gruters, that policy is disproportionately enforced against conservatives. Fine pointed to Black Lives Matter advocates excusing or arguing in favor of the violence that accompanied some of the protests against police abuses last summer without punishment from social media platforms as one example.
The bills, HB 439 and SB 810, would also prevent the state and local governments from buying products made in China, starting Jan. 1, 2023.
Fine said he doesn’t see any constitutional issues with singling out Big Tech companies, arguing they don’t have a right to do business with the state. He said he uses many of the companies’ products — he streamed a press conference about the bill on Facebook live on Tuesday — and doesn’t want to ban them. But he wants to use the threat of the ban to get them to “do the right thing.”
“If any of these companies that reverse course and acknowledge they’ve made a mistake, I’ll take them out of the bill,” Fine said.
It’s a tactic he’s used before against a tech company.
In 2019 Fine, who is Jewish and a staunch supporter of Israel, pushed DeSantis to place Airbnb, the vacation rental accommodations platform, on Florida’s Scrutinized Companies List because of its policy of not offering its services to Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
Airbnb later reversed its policy after Fine also moved to exclude the company from a bill that would’ve banned local governments from imposing new regulations on vacation rentals.
Unlike Airbnb, however, which had only scant business with the state, the large tech companies targeted by Fine and Gruters provide large amounts of goods and services to the state.
Amazon did more than $500,000 in contracts with the Florida Department of Health alone since December,
including providing website services for COVID-19 vaccinations and providing personal protection equipment such as masks and gloves to help stop the coronavirus. DeSantis told a conservative group in Texas earlier this month that discrimination of conservatives by Big Tech is “probably the most important legislative issue that we’re going to have to get right this year.” But Fine said that while he didn’t know if his bill would get explicit support from DeSantis, the issue should be addressed in some form by the Legislature.
“The problem is when you engage in subjective viewpoint discrimination — who gets to choose truth? And it’s dangerous.”