by: Ramon Tomey
The Republican governor of Florida has announced that his administration will look into Big Tech censorship. Gov. Ron DeSantis told an audience in Austin, Texas that Florida is considering ways to respond to technology firms’ recent censorship. DeSantis stated that the role Big Tech companies play in the lives of Americans made the issue “much more pressing.”
DeSantis made the remarks during a keynote luncheon hosted by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The governor commented that tech companies censoring reports specifically from the New York Post bothered him. “I was very disturbed to see credible articles [from the Post] about Hunter Biden actively suppressed by these Big Tech oligarchs … [which] had an impact on the presidential election,” he said.
The Florida governor said the events that unfolded since the beginning of 2021 were “really chilling.” DeSantis referenced Twitter’s banning of President Donald Trump, which he called a “big deal.” However, the governor said that the actions toward alternative social media platform Parler bothered him more than Trump’s suspension.
DeSantis explained that Parler was a response to Twitter’s conservative censorship. The platform had gained traction in recent months, with users jumping there from Twitter. But Apple and Google have since removed Parler from their app store and Amazon terminated the site’s web hosting contract on its servers.
Dubbing the actions toward Parler as a “coordinated assault,” DeSantis condemned the Big Tech oligarchy as being “more powerful than the government itself.”
The governor warned that Big Tech firms were already “serving as judge, jury and executioner with no due process” and could “effectively wipe someone’s livelihood off the map.”
Given these actions by Big Tech, DeSantis put forward protections for people against Big Tech. “I think there needs to be protections for people. I don’t think we can have a couple of these far-left-wing tech oligarchs control the information in our country. I’m not going to accept that and I don’t think any of you are going to accept that. So, we’re thinking through what we can do to provide people some protections,” the governor elaborated.
DeSantis now supports an overhaul of Section 230 protections
Back when DeSantis served as a U.S. congressman for Florida, he had already been concerned about Big Tech censorship and how these companies hide behind Section 230 protections. “I was somebody that … supported [Section] 230, all that stuff when I was in Congress to repeal it,” he recounted.
The now-Florida governor then shared that Section 230 needed to be fully thought over. He explained that if conservatives could be censored for having views that challenge the Silicon Valley-approved narrative, it would mean that the core freedoms and values protected by the First Amendment are being threatened.
“I want a society in which we have a robust flow of information,” he added.
DeSantis concluded that his state was going to take action on the issue, alongside Texas, staing: “We’re thinking very, very deeply about this. I think it’s probably the most important legislative issue that we’re going to have to get right this year and next year in Florida.”
The Florida governor appears to have an ally in Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, his GOP party mate. Cruz has been an outspoken critic of Big Tech and its biased censorship. Back in October 2020, he slammed Big Tech censorship as “the single greatest threat to free speech and democracy” in America.
Speaking to Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow, the Texas lawmaker warned that “brazen” Silicon Valley billionaires have “amassed more power than ever seen before over information, the public square [and] discourse.” Cruz continued that these same billionaires have used their newfound power toward “shamelessly silencing and censoring conservatives.” (Related: Ted Cruz: Big Tech believes it has authority over what the press is allowed to report.)
The Texas senator exhorted President Donald Trump and the Department of Justice to use “enforcement and protection actions” to ensure First Amendment protections are maintained.
Later that month, Cruz slammed Twitter for its censorship of the Post‘s stories on Hunter Biden. In a strongly-worded letter, the lawmaker claimed the social media site’s decision to suppress the stories as “hypocritical.” According to Cruz, the company has allowed plenty of other stories with dubious stories to be posted on the site. (Related: WATCH: Ted Cruz eviscerates Jack Dorsey over whether Twitter is a “publisher.”)
Censorship.news has more about how Big Tech firms undermine the First Amendment.
Sources include:
