Yesterday, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a hearing with executives from tech giants Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
During said hearing, not surprisingly, the executives defended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a government protection that shields such companies from being held legally accountable for posts that users make on their sites.
What’s interesting is that earlier this week, we learned that Google has been actively working to blacklist/blacklisting various media outlets that members of Google’s brass disagree with politically. That list has included ‘The Federalist’ and ‘Zero Hedge.’
The blacklisting is an effort to keep these media companies from Google Ads, the most profitable online ad service. Google says the reason for the potential blacklisting/blacklisting is the ‘disagreeable’ content that various users post on these sites.
So Google is currently trying to punish its political adversaries for doing the very thing that it wants the United States government to continue shielding it from going foward.
It’s a classic case of ‘good enough for thee, but not good enough for me.’
As for Twitter and Facebook, these companies have no business receiving 230 protections. Such protections are meant for platforms that serve as hosts, a place for people of all political views to have equal access to post about those political views.
Twitter and Facebook have become editors, picking winners and losers in the fight of which content/accounts will be widely seen and which ones will not.
Repeatedly, both Twitter and Facebook have stifled conservative speech.
Make no mistake about it, these are private companies. If they want to run their private companies in such a manner, they have the right to do so in the United States.
However, they can do so without government protections. This nation’s government does not need to go protecting these partisan actors that aim to influence the outcomes of our elections.
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