Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even
More Aggressively
The repressive objective of the Democratic-controlled Congress is to
transfer the power to police and censor political discourse from these tech
giants to themselves.
Glenn Greenwald
Mar 26
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pachai and Twitter
CEO Jack Dorsey testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Mar.
25, 2021
Over the course of five-plus hours on Thursday, a House Committee along with
two subcommittees badgered three tech CEOs, repeatedly demanding that they
censor more political content from their platforms and vowing legislative
retaliation if they fail to comply. The hearing - convened by the House
Energy and Commerce Committee's Chair Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and
the two Chairs of its Subcommittees, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky
(D-IL) - was one of the most stunning displays of the growing authoritarian
effort in Congress to commandeer the control which these companies wield
over political discourse for their own political interests and purposes.
As I noted when I reported last month on the scheduling of this hearing,
this was "the third time in less than five months that 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." The bulk of Thursday's lengthy hearing consisted of one
Democratic member after the next complaining that Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pachai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
have failed in their duties to censor political voices and ideological
content that these elected officials regard as adversarial or harmful,
accompanied by threats that legislative punishment (including possible
revocation of Section 230 immunity) is imminent in order to force compliance
(Section 230 is the provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that
shields internet companies from liability for content posted by their
users).
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Republican members largely confined their grievances to the opposite
concern: that these social media giants were excessively silencing
conservative voices in order to promote a liberal political agenda (that
complaint is only partially true: a good amount of online censorship, like
growing law enforcement domestic monitoring generally, focuses on all
anti-establishment ideologies, not just the right-wing variant). This
editorial censoring, many Republicans insisted, rendered the tech companies'
Section 230 immunity obsolete, since they are now acting as publishers
rather than mere neutral transmitters of information. Some Republicans did
join with Democrats in demanding greater censorship, though typically in the
name of protecting children from mental health disorders and predators
rather than ideological conformity.
As they have done in prior hearings, both Zuckerberg and Pachai spoke like
the super-scripted, programmed automatons that they are, eager to please
their Congressional overseers (though they did periodically issue what
should have been unnecessary warnings that excessive "content moderation"
can cripple free political discourse). Dorsey, by contrast, seemed at the
end of his line of patience and tolerance for vapid, moronic censorship
demands, and - sitting in a kitchen in front of a pile of plates and glasses
- he, refreshingly, barely bothered to hide that indifference. At one point,
he flatly stated in response to demands that Twitter do more to remove
"disinformation": "I don't think we should be the abriters of truth and I
don't think the government should be either."
Zuckerberg in particular has minimal capacity to communicate the way human
beings naturally do. The Facebook CEO was obviously instructed by a team of
public speaking consultants that it is customary to address members of the
Committee as "Congressman" or "Congresswoman." He thus began literally every
answer he gave - even in rapid back and forth questions - with that word. He
just refused to move his mouth without doing that - for five hours (though,
in fairness, the questioning of Zuckerberg was often absurd and
unreasonable). His brain permits no discretion to deviate from his script no
matter how appropriate. For every question directed to him, he paused for
several seconds, had his internal algorithms search for the relevant place
in the metaphorical cassette inserted in a hidden box in his back, uttered
the word "Congressman" or "Congresswoman," stopped for several more seconds
to search for the next applicable spot in the spine-cassette, and then
proceeded unblinkingly to recite the words slowly transmitted into his
neurons. One could practically see the gears in his head painfully churning
as the cassette rewound or fast-forwarded. This tortuous ritual likely
consumed roughly thirty percent of the hearing time. I've never seen members
of Congress from across the ideological spectrum so united as they were by
visceral contempt for Zuckerberg's non-human comportment:
But it is vital not to lose sight of how truly despotic hearings like this
are. It is easy to overlook because we have become so accustomed to
political leaders successfully demanding that social media companies censor
the internet in accordance with their whims. Recall that Parler, at the time
it was the most-downloaded app in the country, was removed in January from
the Apple and Google Play Stores and then denied internet service by Amazon,
only after two very prominent Democratic House members publicly demanded
this. At the last pro-censorship hearing convened by Congress, Sen. Ed
Markey (D-MA) explicitly declared that the Democrats' grievance is not that
these companies are censoring too much but rather not enough. One Democrat
after the next at Thursday's hearing described all the content on the
internet they want gone: or else. Many of them said this explicitly.
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At one point toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX), in
the context of the January 6 riot, actually suggested that the government
should create a list of organizations they unilaterally deem to be "domestic
terror organization" and then provide it tech companies as guidance for what
discussions they should "track and remove": in other words, treat these
groups the same was as ISIS and Al Qaeda.
Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is: watching
government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of political speech
and threaten punishment for failures to obey. As I detailed last month, the
U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the state violates the First
Amendment's free speech guarantee when they coerce private actors to censor
for them - exactly the tyrannical goal to which these hearings are
singularly devoted.
There are genuine problems posed by Silicon Valley monopoly power.
Monopolies are a threat to both political freedom and competition, which is
why economists of most ideological persuasions have long urged the need to
prevent them. There is some encouraging legislation pending in Congress with
bipartisan support (including in the House Antitrust Subcommittee before
which I testified several weeks ago) that would make meaningful and
productive strides toward diluting the unaccountable and undemocratic power
these monopolies wield over our political and cultural lives. If these
hearings were about substantively considering those antitrust measures, they
would be meritorious.
But that is hard and difficult work and that is not what these hearings are
about. They want the worst of all worlds: to maintain Silicon Valley
monopoly power but transfer the immense, menacing power to police our
discourse from those companies into the hands of the Democratic-controlled
Congress and Executive Branch.
And as I have repeatedly documented, it is not just Democratic politicians
agitating for greater political censorship but also their liberal
journalistic allies, who cannot tolerate that there may be any places on the
internet that they cannot control. That is the petty wannabe-despot
mentality that has driven them to police the "unfettered" discussions on the
relatively new conversation app Clubhouse, and escalate their attempts to
have writers they disliked removed from Substack. Just toady, The New York
Times warns, on its front page, that there are "unfiltered" discussions
taking place on Google-enabled podcasts:
New York Times front page, Mar. 26, 2021
We are taught from childhood that a defining hallmark of repressive regimes
is that political officials wield power to silence ideas and people they
dislike, and that, conversely, what makes the U.S. a "free" society is the
guarantee that American leaders are barred from doing so. It is impossible
to reconcile that claim with what happened in that House hearing room over
the course of five hours on Thursday.
