The Trump Administration is taking action to promote free speech on the internet and hold social media companies accountable for their censorship.
- At President Trump’s direction, the Administration is submitting a petition to the FCC for proposed regulatory changes to hold social media companies accountable for their censorship.
- The petition asks the FCC to end the loophole that allows social media companies to escape civil lawsuits for their own speech, fact checks, and de-platforming.
- The petition seeks to expose social media companies to liability as a speaker or publisher if they act as editors of content on their platform or remove lawful speech based on politics.
- It also requests that the FCC keep social media companies honest by mandating transparency of their moderation practices.
- These regulatory actions will help promote free speech on the internet and give consumers the ability to know how social media companies treat their speech online.
President Trump is committed to combatting censorship and fighting for Americans’ free speech online.
- This petition follows President Trump’s executive order to uphold free and open debates on online platforms.
- The order called for the start of a regulatory process to clarify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to ensure social media companies are not entitled to immunity when they but engage in deceptive or pretextual censorship on their platforms.
- The EO also specified that social media companies shouldn’t receive liability protections when they act as editors of content on their platform or take down lawful speech based on politics.
- The White House launched a Tech Bias Reporting tool to allow Americans to report incidents of online censorship, bias, and discrimination.
- The President also held a White House social media summit, where he called out social media’s censorship and emphasized the importance of free speech in our society.
All good points but let’s leave Dr. Stella Immanuel’s theories about hydroxychloroquine, alien DNA, and the physical effects of having sex with witches and demons in your dreams on the stable floor where these theories belong.
Watching the leaders of the major social media companies at today’s House Congressional hearing, it remains fascinating that they ALL deny virtually any bias or targeting of content by their organizations despite a substantial e-mail trail of evidence going back years where management boasts of their success at it. However, I’m sure that by tonight’s evening news cycle, the mainstream media will have sufficiently “sanitized” the coverage (translation: spin the coverage to fit the liberal agenda that says there is no problem) to say to the public that it was largely a right-wing witch hunt. Thus the public that still only watches the mainstream media will learn nothing.
Social media platforms exist, with Congressional exemption to regulation, based on a commitment to NOT apply a bias in either direction. That means the platform is NOT supposed to filter posts beyond those narrow set of items that fall into the categories of endorsing or promoting violence, pornography and the other limited categories listed by the FCC and FTC. Given the substantial evidence, via internal company documents presented today, these platforms have willingly violated the agreements they all committed to in order to obtain their original Congressional exemptions. The obvious course of action by the government, if it is serious about addressing the numerous violations documented, will be to unfortunately do what government always does. Which is to strip all social media platforms of their exemption and regulate them like any other media source. It was amusing watching some of the Democrat members of Congress trying to articulate anti-trust, when it was clear their understanding of the topic is nil. Yet they mouthed the words their staffs prepared for them.
While this potentially new regulatory layer may be a mild discomfort to the likes of Facebook and Google, neither one will be materially harmed. That means they won’t be substantially impacted financially. They both have dozens, if not hundreds, of full-time lobbyists living in Washington to ensure that any regulations passed by Congress cripples any new social media start-ups in the space (Parler anyone?), while ensuring both Facebook and Google remain the dominate forces in the space.
I guess the big tech companies are still at it, I just tried to access a news item on fauxnews about a north korean defector and how SURPRIZED he was AMERICANS are so nice, We are not allowed to hear good things about AMERICA or bad things about north korea, must not allow the truth to be heard.