Editor's note: This article was first published at Wirepoints.org.
Yet another Congressional hearing has been scheduled to badger tech platforms into doing the censorship that the First Amendment would prohibit government from doing directly.
This time, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Chicago) will play chief speech cop in her role as chair of the Consumer Protection and Commerce Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
In a joint statement she issued last week with the chair of another subcommittee, she cited “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud” as examples of how big tech has “intensified national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety.”
“We must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation,” she wrote.
So, Schakowsky will be telling Twitter, Facebook and Google what you should know and not know about COVID, election integrity and more.
Worried? You darn well should be, and it ought not matter what party you are in or what party is playing speech cop.
But here, the culprits are obvious: “That Democrats are seeking to use their control of state power to coerce and intimidate private tech companies to censor — and indeed have already succeeded in doing so — is hardly subject to reasonable debate. They are saying explicitly that this is what they are doing.”
It’s not a Republican or right wing partisan who wrote that, but liberal columnist Glenn Greenwald. He adds, “This dynamic has become so common that Democrats now openly pressure Silicon Valley companies to censor content they dislike.”
Read the rest of Greenwald’s recent column for a good analysis of why the First Amendment might directly apply. It’s true that private companies like big tech aren’t directly bound by the First Amendment but, as Greenwald writes, it’s another matter when government tries to coerce them into censorship, as is happening now.