GOP senators have threatened for a while to take up the Trump regime's battlecry on social meadia "fairness" in order to make social media stop policing their white supremacist allies and to go after marginalized groups to silence them permanently, and now they are bringing the force of subpoenas and legislation to bear just in time for the election.
The Trump administration is pressuring Senate Republicans to ratchet up scrutiny of social media companies it sees as biased against conservatives in the run-up to the November election, people familiar with the conversations say. And the effort appears to be paying off.
In recent weeks, the White House has pressed Senate Republican leaders on key committees to hold public hearings on the law that protects Facebook, Twitter and other internet companies from lawsuits over how they treat user posts, three Senate staffers told POLITICO. They requested anonymity to discuss private communications.
And action is following. Senate Commerce Chair Roger Wicker held a vote in his committee Thursday to issue subpoenas to the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google to testify about how they police content on their platforms. That's after Democrats initially prevented the Mississippi Republican from pushing through subpoenas that could have compelled the CEOs to testify with only a few days' notice.
Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), meanwhile, last week introduced new legislation to address alleged bias on social media and the same day scheduled a markup of the bill for Thursday — a move that would have made it the fastest any bill on tech's liability protections has moved from introduction to a markup on Capitol Hill in recent memory. Graham announced Thursday that consideration of the measure had been tabled.
Both committees are targeting liability protections that have been credited with fueling Silicon Valley's success. The provision — enshrined in a 1996 law known as Section 230 — has allowed online businesses to grow without fear of lawsuits over user posts or their decisions to remove or otherwise moderate users' content.
Both lawmakers have reason to want to get in the White House's good graces. Graham, a prominent Trump ally, is facing the fight of his political life to hold onto his South Carolina seat against Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison. And Wicker will want to maintain a firm hold on his gavel, which gives him jurisdiction over most legislation targeting Section 230.
The congressional actions mark a sudden and dramatic escalation of efforts by Senate Republicans to revamp the legal shield — particularly with a Congress readying for elections and embroiled in negotiations over Covid relief. But Republicans say Section 230 has allowed social media platforms to discriminate against conservative viewpoints with impunity. Tech companies deny any such bias, and the administration itself has noted there's limited academic data to back up the concerns.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a top Trump ally on tech and longtime critic of Section 230, called the recent surge of activity by his colleagues "a sea change." President Donald Trump, he said, has been a driving force in rallying them.
“There’s hardly a conversation I have with the president where this doesn’t come up, where Section 230 does not come up, usually raised by him,” Hawley said in an interview. “It is much on his mind and I think his strong stance on this issue has had a big effect in opening the eyes of some of my Republican colleagues to realize this is a major issue.”
There are multiple reasons as to why Trump and the GOP want to go after social media giants, and frankly they are way too powerful and unaccountable. But the real goal here is to force Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other media platforms to knuckle under the GOP and serve as their digital media arm, or the GOP opens the floodgates for these corporations to be sued out of existence.
It's also a chilling reminder that if they don't stop tagging Trump's lies and disinformation as such in the final weeks of the election, the price they will pay will be in the tens of billions.
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