Countering Big Tech censorship through state legislation, Part One

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Power Line

Paul Mirengoff

January 14, 2021

It’s obvious that, as Scott has been documenting, Big Tech is engaged in a concerted effort to censor conservatives. It seeks to prevent us from presenting our ideas to the public on an equal basis with liberals, left-liberals, and even the most extreme leftists.

How can we counter this? The First Amendment doesn’t forbid censorship by private corporations. The Democratic Congress isn’t going to go to bat for free speech by conservatives. Neither will the Biden/Harris administration. Antitrust litigation might provide a remedy at the end of a very long struggle, but it might not.

A reader and distinguished lawyer has offered an approach to fighting back that I believe merits very serious consideration — state legislation banning viewpoint discrimination by Big Tech. He writes:

States can bar large social media platforms and online service providers from discriminating against their state’s residents based on their lawful political statements or affiliations. Such laws could even allow Big Tech to continue deleting dangerous material, etc. if they wanted–so long as the standards were applied neutrally across the political spectrum. That way, someone could sue for ideological discrimination, and if they presented evidence of a similarly “problematic” account or tweet that was not deleted, they could prevail in court.

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Such statutes are not uncommon. California, for example, routinely passes privacy, employment, and other laws with similar enforcement mechanisms against international companies. And on the international scene, by way of further example, Poland is about to enact a law imposing significant fines (up to $2.2 million) for social media platforms [that] censor lawful speech.

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Countering Big Tech censorship through state legislation, Part Two

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How to Stop Big Tech Censorship (Cont.)

 

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Feb. 24 2021

Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report talks to Steven Crowder (Host, Louder with Crowder) and Bill Richmond about their Facebook lawsuit, the ongoing conservative censorship by Big Tech, and why cancel culture has created so many secret celebrity Republicans. In this clip Steven discusses the difficulty of having a conservative news Facebook business. Facebook is constantly changing it’s rules or simply not telling anyone what the rules are. Conservative media is in such demand that even big tech conservative censorship has not been able to prevent the successes like “Louder With Crowder” or “The Ben Shapiro Show”. Steven gives a warning to people putting their business on Facebook especially if you are a part of conservative social media.

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STOP Censoring or Pay Up! Nebraska Legislature Sends Clear Message to Big Tech

Kayla Sargent

February 26th, 2021

Yet another state legislature has stepped up to fight rampant Big Tech censorship. 

Nebraska State Senator Curt Friesen (R) introduced the Social Media Fairness Act into the Nebraska state legislature last month, and the legislative body held a hearing for it Feb. 25. The bill stated that its aim was to curtail the power of “dominant social media web site"

Under the proposal, if a Nebraska resident’s social media account is “disabled, suspended, or censored,” then the social media platform in question “must provide electronic notice to such individual or business user within thirty days after taking such action.”

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