90 Miles From Tyranny : Justin Amash Protects Big Tech’s Immunity Privileges to Enact Orwellian Nightmare

Monday, June 24, 2019

Justin Amash Protects Big Tech’s Immunity Privileges to Enact Orwellian Nightmare

Amash is opposing Sen. Josh Hawley’s reform to protect free speech in the digital public square.

Impeachment cheerleader Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) is rallying to protect Big Tech monopolists and their ability to capriciously kick conservative and libertarian voices off their platforms while keeping the legal immunity granted to them by the federal government.

Amash took to his Twitter account to whine against the Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act, a common sense reform that will be introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) to eliminate special privileges for social media corporations if they acted as publishers rather than as neutral platforms.

Amash claims that removing Big Tech’s sweetheart exemptions in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, thus protecting free speech from Orwellian corporate censorship, would somehow be dystopian.

Section 230 exempts social media entities like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter from being liable for user-published content on their platforms. They are not regulated as publishers, but have started behaving like ones in recent years by implementing Draconian censorship policies to strangle the voices of primarily right-wing dissidents.

“With Section 230, tech companies get a sweetheart deal that no other industry enjoys: complete exemption from traditional publisher liability in exchange for providing a forum free of political censorship,” Hawley said in a statement regarding the need for his legislation. “Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, big tech has failed to hold up its end of the bargain.”

“There’s a growing list of evidence that shows big tech companies making editorial decisions to censor viewpoints they disagree with,” Hawley added. “Even worse, the entire process is shrouded in secrecy because these companies refuse to make their protocols public. This legislation simply states that if the tech giants want to keep their government-granted immunity, they must bring transparency and accountability to their editorial processes and prove that they don’t...