Government cannot fix Twitter when government is the problem
Tiana Lowe
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For the last half-decade, Republicans have begun to join Democrats in their crusade to discipline and punish Big Tech. While the intentions vary — each side simply wants the others’ speech banned — the conclusions are largely the same: corporations such as Facebook and YouTube are too corrupt to be so influential, and as a result, the government has a responsibility to regulate the most popular social media platforms.
All of this petty populism ignores a crucial factor elucidated by the latest edition of the Twitter Files document dump, namely that in many cases of social media gone censorious, the government is a huge part of the problem.
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It now seems possible, if not likely, that the FBI intentionally subpoenaed the now infamous Hunter Biden laptop with the primary intention not of investigating the first son’s crimes, but rather to silence any scandal that could harm Joe Biden’s election bid.
The FBI paid Twitter $3.4 million to process the agency’s requests, which included the censoring of accounts they claimed were Russian bots sowing “disinformation.” Disinformation, of course, is anything the professional war-mongering, domestic surveillance spooks decide it is.
Without the FBI’s catch-and-kill scheme — first paying off Twitter and then having it suppress the since-vindicated New York Post story in advance of its publication — would Twitter have had the framework ready to silence the story from its publication? Probably not, considering that the Twitter Files also revealed that former Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth had participated in a strategy session gaming out exactly how they would censor a scandalous leak about Hunter Biden specifically, again, long before the story was ever actually published.
It’s not as though Twitter should remain some sacred cow, immune to government critique or response. After all, the Twitter Files directly call into question whether the company directly violated FEC regulations or if Jack Dorsey lied under oath to Congress when falsely claiming that the site didn’t discriminate and silence conservatives.
But rather than reinvent the wheels of the internet by abusing antitrust laws or stripping down Section 230 protections, what if we start with a common sense rule to bar the FBI from behaving as it did throughout 2020? How about a law banning private companies from taking money from the FBI in exchange for censorship or sacrificing user privacy?
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At minimum, can’t a bipartisan law pass that requires Twitter to disclose publicly taking such money?
Twitter is a mess, but the FBI is an abomination. We cannot trust the government to behave liberally, so why would we believe that government regulation of Twitter would at all liberalize speech on the internet?