Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) says that antitrust laws should be used to curb the “massive power” of Facebook and other tech companies who are threatening democratic processes through censorship.
He said:
“I think, number one, the growing power of tech to censor speech is a profound threat. We’re seeing now some two-thirds of Americans are getting their news through social media, and these tech companies are hard-left. They are partisan Democrats, and what we’re seeing is they’re amplifying the views they agree with, those of liberal Democrats, and they are suppressing the views of conservatives. They are blocking conservatives.”
“The scope of the power is truly unprecedented. You think back to the heights of yellow journalism when publisher William Randolph Hearst controlled much of media and in fact got America into the Spanish-American War. These tech companies have power William Randolph Hearst could never have imagined. The ability, if there’s a view they dislike, simply to silence it so that if you put a post out there if you put a tweet out there, it simply goes into the void, into oblivion, and no one sees it. Likewise, they have the ability, if there are views they want to promote, to just have everything on your feed be the views they want to promote. That is invidious. It is invisible, and it is profoundly dangerous.”
He made his comments during a Tuesday interview with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on Breitbart News Tonight.
These tech companies have untold power, never seen before. And, Cruz added, “…they have the ability, if there are views they want to promote, to just have everything on your feed be the views they want to promote. That is invidious. It is invisible, and it is profoundly dangerous,” Cruz said.
He suggests there are two solutions:
One is a congressional response. They are protected because they are allegedly “neutral public forums”. Under the Communications Decency Act, section 230, they can’t be sued. That is only if they are neutral. It protects them from lawsuits, but if they are not neutral, they are not protected from Congress.
“A second remedy is considering using anti-trust laws. By any measure, Facebook is larger and more powerful than Standard Oil was the antitrust laws broke it up. It’s larger and more power than AT&T was when antitrust laws broke it up and given that, I think we need to have serious consideration about the massive power we’re seeing of these tech companies to subvert our democratic process.”
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