Bipartisan Big Tech bill would open the door to more censorship

Hudson Crozier

July 31, 11:51 AM July 31, 11:51 AM

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Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) want to create a new federal agency to regulate major tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and social media platforms. Among other things, their Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act is designed to assist the federal government’s crackdown on what it deems harmful speech.

While announcing their bill, the senators listed a variety of ways it will “rein in Big Tech.” They assure us of their good intentions to protect children on social media, ensure antitrust compliance, and more.

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They also mention the threat of “disinformation.” Sure enough, nothing in the 158-page bill requires content moderation policies to be friendly to free speech. In fact, it requires the agency to crack down on whatever is vaguely considered “bullying” and “harassment.” This might as well be a “hate speech” policy.

One paragraph also reads: ‘‘The Commission shall establish a standardized policy that operators of dominant platforms can adopt regarding content moderation and appeals of content moderation decisions.”

In other words, the government would recommend a set of speech restrictions for platforms to adopt in their terms of service and enforce compliance with those terms of service. This would add to the numerous other agencies that have monitored tech platforms in this way to ensure they are meeting the government’s censorship demands.

And of course, no overreaching bill is complete without a broad mandate to protect “national security,” that catch-all term used to attack every civil liberty we hold dear. As we know from the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, the government may dishonestly label anything a foreign threat to justify suppressing it.

The senators ironically claim that this legislation will “promote free speech.” That makes sense in the context of Warren’s distorted views. She has spent years stirring up a moral panic about online “disinformation,” arguing that we must censor supposedly illegitimate speech so that legitimate speech can thrive.

But as a Republican, Graham has at least pretended to be concerned about the suppression of all legal speech. Perhaps he thought this was the best Big Tech bill that could survive in a divided Congress at the moment. The good arguments against it, though, vastly outweigh its merits.

Agencies have already taken creative liberties to make Big Tech censorship part of their statutory functions. Without specific, clear-as-day prohibitions from Congress, getting bureaucrats more entrenched in the inner workings of tech companies is foolish. Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, already made this mistake when they helped create the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency.

Democrats and the administrative state are waiting for any chance to attack the First Amendment, while Republicans eager for bipartisanship are lousy at protecting it. This is one of the defining political battles facing America right now, and reforming the government should come before reforming Big Tech.

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Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.