“For the third time in less than five months,” journalist Glenn Greenwald writes at Substack, “the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing …”
A joint statement by Democrat committee and subcommittee chairs declares: “This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation.”
Wait — the constitutional authority of Congress does not stretch to holding social media “accountable” for political speech. The First Amendment clearly states that “Congress shall make no [such] law …”
And what Congress is forbidden to do, it cannot threaten and intimidate private companies into doing, instead.
“For the same reasons that the Constitution prohibits the government from dictating what information we can see and read … ‚” Greenwald points out, “it also prohibits the government from using its immense authority to coerce private actors into censoring on its behalf.”
Consider longtime Hillary Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri’s response to President Trump’s banning by Twitter and Facebook: “It has not escaped my attention that the day social media companies decided there actually IS more they could do to police Trump’s destructive behavior was the same day they learned Democrats would chair all the congressional committees that oversee them.”
Many on the left — and even some libertarians — continue to argue that Congress plays no role in the censorship being carried out by these private Tech Giants.
They are mistaken — whether because misinformed or disinformed, we can leave to another day.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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