M.D. Kittle of the Federalist writes about efforts on Capitol Hill to prevent future collusion between large technology companies and the government to stop inconvenient speech.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., was among the first to see evidence of what many Americans suspected: Big Tech colluding with the Biden administration to silence speech. Now he’s reintroducing legislation to hold government bureaucrats and social media giants accountable for their sins of omission.
The Missouri Republican, who was attorney general of the Show Me State in 2022, joined with then-Louisiana AG Jeff Landry in suing the federal government for pushing social media companies to censor viewpoints — generally conservative viewpoints — that conflicted with the selected experts’ messaging on Covid. Missouri v. Biden, as the First Amendment lawsuit was known when filed at the time, took aim at the alphabet agencies and the social networks believed to be taking pages from Orwell’s 1984 to shut down speech. …
… Now that the culprits have been exposed, Schmitt said he wants to make sure they can never do what they’ve done again. To that end, he recently reintroduced three bills that he says are designed to protect victims and hold speech suppressors accountable. With a Republican majority in both house of congress, he’s feeling a lot better about the legislation’s chances.
The Censorship Accountability Act creates a right to sue federal employees who violate “rights secured by the First Amendment.” The legislation is modeled on the core enforcement tool of civil rights law. …
… The Transparency in Bureaucratic Communications Act requires inspectors general of federal agencies to investigate and report on “potential collusion between social media companies.”
And the Collude Act does away with Big Tech’s cherished Section 230 protections that “modify or suppress legitimate political speech at the direction of a government entity.” Section 230 of the long-standing telecommunications law has protected tech Goliaths from liability based on content (expression) on their sites for the better part of 30 years. The idea was to keep the burgeoning information superhighway free, open to ideas and expression of all kinds.