Cruz says ‘big tech’ needs regulation
Senator sees bias from social media companies
SAN FRANCISCO – Republican lawmakers led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz threatened social media companies Wednesday with regulation, echoing repeated charges from President Donald Trump and other top GOP officials that Facebook, Google and Twitter target the political speech of right-leaning users to limit their online reach.
At issue is the opaque process with which these companies make decisions on what’s allowed and not allowed on their platforms.
“What makes the threat of political censorship so problematic is the lack of transparency, the invisibility, the ability for a handful of giant tech companies to decide if a particular speaker is disfavored,” Cruz said in his opening remarks during Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse.”
Cruz said he’d consider charging “big tech” with antitrust violations or fraud or could remove the protection from liability provided by a decadesold federal law.
Conservatives have offered no evidence of systematic efforts to suppress political speech. The Silicon Valley tech companies say they strike a balance between users’ rights to freely express themselves and keeping hate, abuse and misinformation off their platforms. They deny censorship of conservative voices but acknowledge they’ve made missteps in moderating content. They also concede that their staffers tend to be liberal.
Democrats have dismissed allegations of anti-conservative bias as a “right-wing conspiracy theory.” Liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for Americareleased a study this week that it says shows that rightleaning pages have roughly the same amount of engagement as left-leaning pages on Facebook.
Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, said Wednesday that Congress should increase oversight of the major tech companies but not over allegations of anti-conservative bias, “which have been disproven time and time again.”
Last month, Trump accused all
“What makes the threat of political censorship so problematic is the lack of transparency.”
three companies of liberal bias in how they police their online platforms, saying they harbor hatred “for a certain group of people that happen to be in power, that happen to have won the election” and threatened regulation in response.
“Something is happening with those groups of folks that are running Facebook and Google and Twitter, and I do think we have to get to the bottom of it,” Trump said.
Allegations of anti-conservative bias have become a rallying cry in recent years and have been raised in multiple sessions on Capitol Hill.
White House ally Rep. Devin Nunes, a Republican from California, recently filed a lawsuit against Twitter and some of its users for defamation seeking $250 million in damages. Facebook took fire last month for temporarily blocking the account of Dan Scavino, the White House social media director, after mistaking it for an automated account.
“It’s time for tech companies like Google and Facebook to start embracing the spirit of the First Amendment. Not just for their own employees, but for all of the Americans who use their platforms,” Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said during Wednesday’s hearing.
Neil Potts, public policy director at Facebook, told lawmakers that the company had spoken with dozens of members of Congress and conservative groups to assess whether it’s “unintentionally biased” against conservative viewpoints in an inquiry into allegations of bias led by former Sen. Jon Kyl of Nebraska and a team at the Washington-based law firm Covington & Burling.
“Sen. Kyl and his team are now reviewing our external and internal policies. While conducting this review, Sen. Kyl and his team have also been engaged in reviewing and providing insights into future policy changes under consideration,” Potts said at Wednesday’s hearing.
Facebook has been a punching bag for conservatives for years. In 2016, reports that its moderators suppressed conservative voices prompted an inquiry by the Senate Commerce Committee. Facebook said its internal investigation found no evidence of bias but held a meeting with big names from conservative political and media circles.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied Facebook’s policies are a product of its liberal cocoon in Silicon Valley but conceded that Facebook doesn’t always make the right call when removing conservative content.
Testifying for Twitter, Carlos Monje, the company’s director of public policy and philanthropy, described Twitter as an “impartial” platform.
“Twitter does not use political viewpoints, perspectives or party affiliation to make any decisions,” he told lawmakers Wednesday.
Missing at the hearing was Google. The Republican-controlled committee rejected the witness the search giant offered because he did not have “comparable seniority” to the other witnesses, Cruz said. He pledged to hold a separate hearing on political bias with Google.
Google has repeatedly denied any partisanship in search results.